Understanding the Spreading Patterns of Mobile Phone Viruses

By Pu Wang, Marta C. González, César A. Hidalgo, Albert-László Barabási. Science, 2009

451 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Viruses and Mobile Phones While traditional cellphones have been relatively immune to viruses, smartphones (like Palm, Blackberry, iPhone, and many Nokia brands) that can share programs and data with each other could potentially be vulnerable to virus epidemics. Why then haven't we experienced any major mobile virus outbreak so far? Wang et al. (p. 1071; published online 2 April; see the Perspective by Havlin) believe that the answer is related to the spreading patterns possible in the current mobile phone systems. They studied the anonymized billing record of a mobile phone company, representing the calling patterns and the coordinates of the closest mobile phone tower each time a group of 6.2 million mobile phone subscribers used their phone. While a Bluetooth virus could reach all susceptible users given sufficient time, its spread, limited by human mobility, was relatively slow. In contrast, MMS viruses would have an explosive spreading pattern, but could only reach the group of individuals that know each other and carry the same phone. Thus, no major virus outbreak is likely until one operating system encompasses a larger fraction of the total smartphone market. Current mobile phone usage prevents major mobile virus outbreaks, but conditions could arise leading to a phone epidemic. 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.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/608f1bcd612239d01af7e38a60cec35e70a4a80f

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Citations in the corpus

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