Mechanisms for spreading of computer virus on the Internet: an overview

The increasing outbreaks of computer viruses lead to a significant threat to the Internet. In this review we firstly give a brief introduction of computer virus including definition, classification, and characteristics. Then we turn on the overview that how viruses spread on networks in different topologies, especially in the context of computer viruses spreading on the Internet. Recent epidemic studies on the uncorrelated and correlated networks in terms of homogeneity and heterogeneity have been reviewed and compared their distinctions with regard to the main characteristic in epidemiology: epidemic threshold.