An epidemiological model of virus spread and cleanup

Quite a good, focused paper on the outbreak of malware.

Signature based anti-virus technologies are widely used to fight computer viruses. It is difficult to evaluate such systems because they work in the wild and few companies would be willing to turn them off to be part of a control group! This paper presents a new model of these technologies that can be used to predict and evaluate their effectiveness. The paper will demonstrate how the model can be used to understand the overall system dynamics, calculate expected costs of outbreaks, give insight into the relative importance of parts of the system and suggest ways to improve the technology. It is also used to evaluate new approaches to fighting viruses.

Source: An epidemiological model of virus spread and cleanup,  Williamson, Matthew M.; Laeveillae, Jasmin.