Toward understanding how the human vigilance contains the prevalence of computer viruses

Abstract

As it is known, computer users who notice the existence of electronic viruses will take active measures to defend against the viruses before they prevail on networks. However, the most of former computer virus epidemic models ignore the human vigilance completely. This paper aims to understand how the human awareness prohibits virus spreading. So a new computer virus propagation model where the viral prevalence is not quite high is developed. Under moderate assumptions, this model admits one equilibrium which is virus-free. And it is shown to be globally asymptotically stable. Some numerical examples are also given. The obtained result clearly exhibits that enough vigilance greatly benefits the containment of computer viruses.