Modeling computer virus prevalence with a susceptible-infected-susceptible model with reintroduction

Computer viruses are an extremely important aspect of computer security, and understanding their spread and extent is an important component of any defensive strategy. Epidemiological models have been proposed to deal with this issue, and we present one such here. We consider a modification of the Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) epidemiological model as a model of computer virus spread. This model includes a reintroduction parameter, which models the rerelease of a computer virus, or the introduction of a new virus. This is a more realistic model of computer virus spread than the standard SIS model, and can be used to understand the behavior of the quasi-stationary regime of the SIS model. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.