Combined Heuristic Attack Strategy on Complex Networks

Usually, the existence of a complex network is considered an advantage feature and efforts are made to increase its robustness against an attack. However, there exist also harmful and/or malicious networks, from social ones like spreading hoax, corruption, phishing, extremist ideology, and terrorist support up to computer networks spreading computer viruses or DDoS attack software or even biological networks of carriers or transport centers spreading disease among the population. New attack strategy can be therefore used against malicious networks, as well as in a worst-case scenario test for robustness of a useful network. A common measure of robustness of networks is their disintegration level after removal of a fraction of nodes. This robustness can be calculated as a ratio of the number of nodes of the greatest remaining network component against the number of nodes in the original network. Our paper presents a combination of heuristics optimized for an attack on a complex network to achieve its greatest disintegration. Nodes are deleted sequentially based on a heuristic criterion. Efficiency of classical attack approaches is compared to the proposed approach on Barabási-Albert, scale-free with tunable power-law exponent, and Erdős-Rényi models of complex networks and on real-world networks. Our attack strategy results in a faster disintegration, which is counterbalanced by its slightly increased computational demands.