A study of the effectiveness of the Profile Closeness Attack on the Sicilian Mafia Network

Abstract

This paper examines the vulnerability of the Sicil-ian Mafia Network to various central-attack strategies. Social Network Analysis tools are proved to be most effective method in understanding and analysing terrorist networks. The fallback strategy is a good option when the critical nodes are protected. We have performed simultaneous and sequential attacks on the network under different attack strategies. This work assesses the effectiveness of fallback strategy on a data set of Sicilian Mafia Network. We analyze two different data sets generated by phone calls and direct meeting between the suspected criminals. The results shows that the phone call networks are very much vulnerable to the fallback strategy while it is not the case in meeting networks.