An Ising Model Approach to Malware Epidemiology

Abstract

We introduce an Ising approach to study the spread of malware. The Ising spins up and down are used to represent two states--online and offline--of the nodes in the network. Malware is allowed to propagate amongst online nodes and the rate of propagation was found to increase with data traffic. For a more efficient network, the spread of infection is much slower; while for a congested network, infection spreads quickly.