English

Scale-free topology of e-mail networks

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2009-11-07 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We study the topology of e-mail networks with e-mail addresses as nodes and e-mails as links using data from server log files. The resulting network exhibits a scale-free link distribution and pronounced small-world behavior, as observed in other social networks. These observations imply that the spreading of e-mail viruses is greatly facilitated in real e-mail networks compared to random architectures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0201476,
  title  = {Scale-free topology of e-mail networks},
  author = {Holger Ebel and Lutz-Ingo Mielsch and Stefan Bornholdt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0201476},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages RevTeX, 4 figures PostScript (extended version)