Despite the efforts to design better antivirus software, malware continue to spread and cause enormous damages. Effect of immunizing computer systems as the most effective control policy for preventing such infections is two-fold. On one hand, it increases the global immunity of the network by providing indirect protection for unimmunized systems. On the other hand, raising the awareness of users from the possibility of infection can trigger behavioral changes by which users take measures to reduce their systems’ susceptibility using the antivirus software. Here, we propose the Behavior-Immunity model that allows measurement of vaccination effect based on the indirect protective effect of immunization strategies. It also provides a mean to utilize human behavioral changes to enhance the effectiveness of immunization strategies. In this work, we focus on the word of mouth as the source of user awareness and show that immunization schema can appropriately utilized the behavioral changes to practice better results. We also present a methodology for network immunization which is provably close to the optimal solution. Extensive computational experiments on some synthetic and real-world networks revealed that this strategy offers a significant improvement over well-studied targeted immunization method based on degree centrality.

@article{mirzasoleiman2014modeling,
  title={Modeling the Impact of User Awareness on Immunization Strategies},
  author={Mirzasoleiman, Baharan and Rabiee, Hamid R and Salehi, Mostafa},
  journal={Proc IEEE NetSciCom},
  year={2014}
}