Spam diffusion in a social network initiated by hacked e-mail accounts

Rumour diffusion has been widely studied in the literature. However, most prior work assumes that the rumour initiators are humans. This assumption does not hold in cyber space where some of the accounts are hacked. These hacked accounts aggressively disseminate rumours by continuously sending a large amount of messages. Our results show that when rumours are initiated by hacked accounts, the rumour diffusion dynamics are different. This work suggests that social simulations of interactions over cyber space should capture the fact that spamming accounts also participate in these interactions. The presence of these accounts can alter the simulation dynamics.