The impact of countermeasure propagation on the prevalence of computer viruses

Authors:
Li-Chiou Chen;K. M. Carley
Affiliations:
Dept. of Eng. & Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA, USA;-
Venue:
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics
Year:
2004

Citing 0
Cited 8

Towards controlling virus propagation in information systems with point-to-group information sharing

Decision Support Systems
Mitigation of malware proliferation in P2P networks using double-layer dynamic trust (DDT) management scheme

SARNOFF'09 Proceedings of the 32nd international conference on Sarnoff symposium
Bounding virus proliferation in P2P networks with a diverse-parameter trust management scheme

IEEE Communications Letters
The spread of interacting agents in scale-free networks

ICICS'09 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Information, communications and signal processing
Agent-based simulation of the diffusion of warnings

SpringSim '10 Proceedings of the 2010 Spring Simulation Multiconference
A novel dynamic immunization strategy for computer network epidemics

ISPEC'06 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Information Security Practice and Experience
Simulating the Diffusion of Information: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach

International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems
First passage time and first passage percolation models for analysing network resilience and effective strategies in strategic information warfare research: a brief survey and perspective

International Journal of Information and Computer Security

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Countermeasures such as software patches or warnings can be effective in helping organizations avert virus infection problems. However, current strategies for disseminating such countermeasures have limited their effectiveness. We propose a new approach, called the countermeasure competing (CMC) strategy, and use computer simulation to formally compare its relative effectiveness with three antivirus strategies currently under consideration. CMC is based on the idea that computer viruses and countermeasures spread through two separate but interlinked complex networks - the virus-spreading network and the countermeasure-propagation network, in which a countermeasure acts as a competing species against the computer virus. Our results show that CMC is more effective than other strategies based on the empirical virus data. The proposed CMC reduces the size of virus infection significantly when the countermeasure-propagation network has properties that favor countermeasures over viruses, or when the countermeasure-propagation rate is higher than the virus-spreading rate. In addition, our work reveals that CMC can be flexibly adapted to different uncertainties in the real world, enabling it to be tuned to a greater variety of situations than other strategies.