A novel method for worm containment on dynamic social networks

With the introduction of the World Wide Web and online social networks, people now have sought ways to socialize and make new friends online over a greater distance. Popular social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo have witnessed rapid increases in space and the number of online users over a short period of time. However, alongside with these fast expands comes the threat of malicious softwares such as viruses, worms or false information propagation. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive method for containing worm propagation on dynamic social networks. Our approach first takes into account the network community structure and adaptively keeps it updated as the social network evolves, and then contains worm propagation by distributing patches to most influential users selected from the network communities. To evaluate the performance of our approach we test it on Facebook network dataset [17] and compare the infection rates on several cases with the recent social-based method introduced in [21]. Experimental results show that our approach not only performs faster but also achieves lower infection rates than the social-based method on dynamic social networks.