Understanding the Spreading Patterns of Mobile Phone Viruses

Pu Wang, Marta C. González, César A. Hidalgo, Albert László Barabasi*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

We modeled the mobility of mobile phone users in order to study the fundamental spreading patterns that characterize a mobile virus outbreak. We find that although Bluetooth viruses can reach all susceptible handsets with time, they spread slowly because of human mobility, offering ample opportunities to deploy antiviral software. In contrast, viruses using multimedia messaging services could infect all users in hours, but currently a phase transition on the underlying call graph limits them to only a small fraction of the susceptible users. These results explain the lack of a major mobile virus breakout so far and predict that once a mobile operating system's market share reaches the phase transition point, viruses will pose a serious threat to mobile communications.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1071-1076
Number of pages6
JournalScience
Volume324
Issue number5930
DOIs
StatePublished - 22 May 2009
Externally publishedYes

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