The responsiveness of criminal networks to intentional attacks: Disrupting darknet drug trade.

ABSTRACT: Physical, technological, and social networks are often at risk of intentional attack. Despite the wide-spanning importance of network vulnerability, very little is known about how criminal networks respond to attacks or whether intentional attacks affect criminal activity in the long-run. To assess criminal network responsiveness, we designed an empirically-grounded agent-based simulation using population-level network data on 16,847 illicit drug exchanges between 7,295 users of an active darknet drug market and statistical methods for simulation analysis. We consider three attack strategies: targeted attacks that delete structurally integral vertices, weak link attacks that delete large numbers of weakly connected vertices, and signal attacks that saturate the network with noisy signals.

SUBMITTER: Duxbury S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7482914 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature