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Virus Propagation Modeling in Facebook

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The Influence of Technology on Social Network Analysis and Mining

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks ((LNSN,volume 6))

Abstract

In recent years, online social network services have become part of people’s life. One of the consequences these services bring about is the security problem. In this paper, we propose a virus model based on the application platform of Facebook. We also model virus propagation through emails and compare the behaviors of virus spreading in Facebook and email network. It is found that while Facebook provides a platform for application developers, it also provides the same chance for virus spreading. Virus will spread faster in Facebook network if users of Facebook spend more time on it. Moreover, users’ network generated with BA scale-free model is compared with some sampled networks of Facebook in this paper. The results show that applying BA model in simulations will overestimate the number of infected users a little, but still reflect the trend of virus spreading.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this paper we only consider the case of Web mails.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Hong Kong Government General Research Fund (grant No. CityU-123608).

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Correspondence to Wei Fan .

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Fan, W., Yeung, KH. (2013). Virus Propagation Modeling in Facebook. In: Özyer, T., Rokne, J., Wagner, G., Reuser, A. (eds) The Influence of Technology on Social Network Analysis and Mining. Lecture Notes in Social Networks, vol 6. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1346-2_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1346-2_8

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-7091-1345-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-7091-1346-2

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