The spatial-temporal perspective: the study of the propagation of modern social worms

Due to the critical security threats imposed by social worms, such as Twitter and Facebook, modeling and simulation study of the propagation dynamics of social worms is essential to predict their potential for damage and to understand the propagation characteristics. Modern social worms exhibit one new feature, reinfection-notification. It indicates that malicious messages are sent by neighbors whenever any susceptible or infected recipients open the malicious attachments, and a user will get reminders when new messages come to a social account. Meanwhile, there are two critical problems: dynamic host usage and temporal message processing. First, from a spatial perspective, previous models have not taken into account that public hosts in different locations are shared by several users arising from human mobility, namely, dynamic host usage. Second, from a temporal perspective, the problem of temporal message processing results from the improper assumption that during this period of message checking, unread messages all are read by default, or under the condition that some parts of messages have been read, but the rest of unread messages are no longer processed afterward. To address these problems, we present a novel social worm simulation model in this paper, which adopts 'social network-based sharing' and 'sorting and attenuation' methods. We perform comprehensive theoretical analyses and experimental evaluation to validate our simulation model. The results show that our model is more suitable for modeling the complicated propagation behaviors of modern social worms in hierarchical networks.