A tradeoff between the losses caused by computer viruses and the risk of the manpower shortage.

This article addresses the tradeoff between the losses caused by a new virus and the size of the team for developing an antivirus against the virus. First, an individual-level virus spreading model is proposed to capture the spreading process of the virus before the appearance of its natural enemy. On this basis, the tradeoff problem is modeled as a discrete optimization problem. Next, the influences of different factors, including the infection force, the infection function, the available manpower, the alarm threshold, the antivirus development effort and the network topology, on the optimal team size are examined through computer simulations. This work takes the first step toward the tradeoff problem, and the findings are instructive to the decision makers of network security companies.