Clive sez: "An academic recently studied the topology of human, social networks, and compared it to the Net. His conclusion? Though we love to talk about the similarities between social behavior and our computer networks, they're quite different. In real life, highly social people gravitate towards other highly social people. But on the Net, highly-connected computers are connected to zillions of dead ends. Online, computers don't really care who they're hooked up with — but humans? We want to hang with the cool crowd, heh.
This epiphany has some really interesting implications for security:
"In social networks, where popular people are friends with other popular people, diseases spread easily, said Newman. At the same time, however, this type of network has a small central set of people that the disease can actually reach. 'They support epidemics easily, but… the epidemic is limited in who it can reach,' he said.
The opposite is true for the Internet, the Web and biological networks, said Newman. This makes these types of networks more vulnerable to attack than social networks are."
