Resilience of Social Networks Under Different Attack Strategies

TL;DR

This paper investigates how various types of social networks respond to different attack strategies, revealing their resilience patterns through comparative experiments on multiple network classes.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of social network resilience across different network classes and attack strategies, highlighting their structural vulnerabilities.

Findings

Small world networks show high resilience to random failures.

Scale-free networks are more vulnerable to targeted attacks.

Different attack strategies significantly affect network connectivity.

Abstract

Recent years have seen the world become a closely connected society with the emergence of different types of social networks. Online social networks have provided a way to bridge long distances and establish numerous communication channels which were not possible earlier. These networks exhibit interesting behavior under intentional attacks and random failures where different structural properties influence the resilience in different ways. In this paper, we perform two sets of experiments and draw conclusions from the results pertaining to the resilience of social networks. The first experiment performs a comparative analysis of four different classes of networks namely small world networks, scale free networks, small world-scale free networks and random networks with four semantically different social networks under different attack strategies. The second experiment compares the resilience of these semantically different social networks under different attack strategies. Empirical analysis reveals interesting behavior of different classes of networks with different attack strategies.