We model the mobility of mobile phone users to study the fundamentalspreading patterns characterizing a mobile virus outbreak. We find that whileBluetooth viruses can reach all susceptible handsets with time, they spreadslowly due to human mobility, offering ample opportunities to deploy antiviralsoftware. In contrast, viruses utilizing multimedia messaging services couldinfect all users in hours, but currently a phase transition on the underlyingcall graph limits them to only a small fraction of the susceptible users. Theseresults explain the lack of a major mobile virus breakout so far and predictthat once a mobile operating system's market share reaches the phase transitionpoint, viruses will pose a serious threat to mobile communications.
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