Recoverable prevalence in growing scale-free networks and the effective immunization

Abstract

We study the persistent recoverable prevalence and the extinction of computer viruses via e-mails on a growing scale-free network with new users, which structure is estimated form real data. The typical phenomenon is simulated in a realistic model with the probabilistic execution and detection of viruses. Moreover, the conditions of extinction by random and targeted immunizations for hubs are derived through bifurcation analysis for simpler models by using a mean-field approximation without the connectivity correlations. We can qualitatively understand the mechanisms of the spread in linearly growing scale-free networks.