Eliminating central nodes — for instance, backbone routers in the Internet — “is likely to cause subsequent failures and generate a cascade, while eliminating peripheral nodes will have little effect,” said Columbia University network expert Duncan Watts. Could hackers ever shut down the entire Internet? Could terrorists ever cause a blackout so vast it would darken the entire continent? Yes, say scientists at Arizona State University. Cleverly targeted attacks on complex, real-world networks, such as the Internet and power grids, could lead to a virtual cascade of overload failures that would crash the entire system. “For networks where loads can redistribute among the nodes, intentional attacks can cause the entire or a substantial part of the network to collapse,” mathematics researcher Adilson Motter and electrical engineering professor Ying-Cheng Lai claim in a new paper on the topic published by Physical Review E. Full Story
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