Assessing the Health of a Network Under Attack

When faced with a malware outbreak, the health of a computer network is hard to quantify. Calculating the number of infected nodes is a straightforward approach, but it fails to capture intricacies of the devices that make up the network. The choice between which of two network states is preferable might not correlate directly with the number of infected nodes in each, as different nodes carry different importance to the overall function of the network. In this paper we propose a method of assessing the health of a network under attack from a malware outbreak. The proposed method allows for a quantitative measure of how well a network is handling a malware outbreak, as well as the comparison between different network states and the ranking of possible mitigating actions. The method proposed can be adapted to different networks, with its usefulness increasing with the amount of data available for a given network.