It gets its name because it has a highly irregular structure and there is no one scale that can be used to gain a definitive idea of its organisation. The tangle of neurons in our brains is thought to be a scale-free network, as is the web of social connections that puts us no more than six hops away from anyone on the planet. But instead of studying social networks, Dr Barab si and his colleagues subjected simulations of random networks as well the web and the internet to attack. They treated the web and the net separately because, despite the fact that they are closely associated in the minds of many surfers, they comprise different networks. The web is a collection of pages connected by hyperlinks, whereas the internet is the physical network connected by data passing machines called routers.
Exponential networks cope badly with attacks on random nodes.
Because each link is effectively as important as any other, the random removal of any nodes stops information being moved around. By contrast, the web and the internet cope well with random attacks. Dr Barab si and his colleagues believe that this ability to cope with random attacks is a survival mechanism and explains their ubiquity in the natural world. But when the most highly interconnected links are targeted, the networks start to unravel. Dr Barab si said if hackers used this knowledge, they could do a lot of damage to the internet and the web.