The topological defense in SIS epidemic models

The spreading of dangerous malware or faults in inter-dependent networks of electronics devices has raised deep concern, because from the ICT networks infections may propagate to other Critical Infrastructures producing the well-known domino or cascading effect. Researchers are attempting to develop a high level analysis of malware propagation discarding software details, in order to generalize to the maximum extent the defensive strategies. For example, it has been suggested that the maximum eigenvalue of the network adjacency matrix could act as a threshold for the malware's spreading. This leads naturally to use the spectral graph theory to identify the most critical and influential nodes in technological networks. Many well-known graph parameters have been studied in the past years to accomplish the task. In this work, we test our AV11 algorithm showing that outperforms degree, closeness, betweenness centrality and the dynamical importance. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd.