Effective strategies for targeted attacks to the network of Cosa Nostra affiliates

Abstract

Network dismantling has recently gained interest in the fields of intelligence agencies, anti-corruption analysts and criminal investigators due to its efficiency in disrupting the activity of malicious agents. Here, we apply this approach to detect effective strategies for targeted attacks to Cosa Nostra by analysing the collaboration network of affiliates that participate to the same crimes. We preliminarily detect statistically significant homophily patterns induced by being member of the same mafia syndicate. We also find that links between members belonging to different mafia syndicates play a crucial role in connecting the network into a unique component, confirming the relevance of weak ties. Inspired by this result we investigate the resilience properties of the network under random and targeted attacks with a percolation based toy model. Random removal of nodes results to be quite inefficient in dismantling the network. Conversely, targeted attacks where nodes are removed according to ranked network centralities are significantly more effective. A strategy based on a removal of nodes that takes into account how much a member collaborates with different mafia syndicates has an efficiency similar to the one where nodes are removed according to their degree. The advantage of such a strategy is that it does not require a complete knowledge of the underlying network to be operationally effective.

Disrupting drive-by download networks on Twitter

“…Therefore, the proposed network disruption strategies are analogous to a large body of work that has successfully undertaken a similar approach in other areas (Giommoni et al. 2021 ; Musciotto and Miccichè 2022 ; Hsieh et al. 2014 ).…”

“…Finally, Bright and Delaney ( 2013 ) show that removing hubs in a deep sex trafficking network effectively reduced the size of the most significant connected component after disruption and the number of isolates after a disruption. Similarly, Musciotto and Miccichè analysed Cosa Nostra criminal network and applied a network disruption strategy based on the degree centrality and betweenness to dismantle a criminal network (Musciotto and Miccichè 2022 ). They used a heuristic approach for their analysis which was not based entirely on network features that usually are not available without having a full description of the system, but on properties that can be measured effectively in earlier phases of analysis.…”

“… 2014 ). For example, Musciotto and Miccichè ( 2022 ) use a similar approach to test the effect of different network parameters (degree and betweenness centrality) to disrupt mafia groups while (Hsieh et al. 2014 ) and colleagues adopt the same methodology to determine the best strategy to inhibit contagion.…”

“…In addition to these, we have evaluated a strategy by randomly removing nodes to disrupt the network. Our decision to base the node removal strategy on these parameters is grounded in the literature about criminal networks (Musciotto and Miccichè 2022 ; Giommoni et al. 2021 ), transmissible infections (Giommoni et al.…”

Exploring the landscape of community-based dismantling strategies

“…Different ranking criteria have been proposed to maximize the efficiency of network dismantling, focusing on the detection of the most influential nodes to remove [4][5][6][7], or adopting holistic approaches that focus on the collective, emergent features of complex networks [8][9][10][11]. Due to its flexibility, network dismantling has been applied to different domains, ranging from biology [12] to socio-technical systems [13,14] and crime [15,16].…”