. SCALE-FREE NETWORKS 181 systematically disabling hubs should quickly partition a network into several disjoint components, a highly undesirable situation. To illustrate these matters, Figure shows what happens when we systematically remove vertices from a scale-free graph in comparison to removing the best-connected vertices from an ER random graph. We also show the effect of removing randomly selected vertices from a scale-free graph (which is very similar to randomly removing vertices from an ER graph). A scale-free network is thus seen to be sensitive to a targeted attack, but just as robust as an ER random graph in the case of.
