Dynamical model for individual defence against cyber epidemic attacks

When facing the on-going cyber epidemic threats, individuals usually set up cyber defences to protect their own devices. In general, the individual-level cyber defence is considered to mitigate the cyber threat to some extent. However, few previous studies focus on the interaction between individual-level defence and cyber epidemic attack from the perspective of dynamics. In this study, the authors propose a two-way dynamical framework by coupling the individual defence model with the cyber epidemic model to study the interaction between the network security situation and individual-level defence decision. A new individual-based heterogeneous model for cyber epidemic attacks is established to emphasise the individual heterogeneity in defence strategy. In the meanwhile, a Markov decision process is used to characterise the defence decision in the individual defence decision model. The theoretical and numerical results illustrate that the individual-level defence can dampen the cyber epidemic attack, but the current network security situation, in turn, influences the individual defence decision. Moreover, they obtain a glimpse of the network security situation and the individual defence with respect to different cyber epidemic scenarios.