Simulating email worm propagation based on social network and user behavior

Email worms pose a significant security threat to organizations and computer users today. Because they propagate over a logical network, the traditional epidemic model is unsuitable for modeling their propagation over the internet. However, it is no doubt that accurate modeling the propagation of email worms is helpful to contain th9eir attacks in advance. This paper presents a novel email worms’ propagation model, which is based on a directed and weighted social network. Moreover, the effects of user’s behavior are also considered in this model. To the author’s knowledge, there is little information available considering the effects of them in modeling their propagation. A simulation algorithm is designed for verifying the effectiveness of the presented model. The results show that the presented model can describe the propagation of email worms accurately. Through simulating different containing strategies, we demonstrate that the infected key nodes in email social community can speed up the worm propagating. Last, a new General Susceptible Infectious Susceptible (G-SIS) email worm model is presented, which can predict the propagation scale of email worms accurately.

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