On Modeling Malware Propagation in Interest-Based Overlapping Communities

Abstract

Interest-based communities, where users may have diversified interests and consequently cause communities overlapping, exist extensively in social networks. However, this will inevitably introduce more opportunities for malware spreading, whose propagation model is fundamentally different from that in currently widely-studied contact-based social networks. To address this issue, we firstly investigate the basic differences between interest-based communities and contact-based social networks. Then, the problem is formulated, and a model for malware propagation in interest-based overlapping communities is put forward. The proposed model fully considers the characters of such environment and reveals the malware spreading rules in randomly overlapping interest communities. Moreover, the model is transformed into a lightweight computational complexity mode so as to be easily utilized in practice. Finally, our model is verified with a simulation which is based on real-world dataset from Youtube interest communities, showing the theoretical results match the simulation results very well.