  Being motivated by recent developments in the theory of complex networks, we
examine the robustness of communication networks under intentional attack that
takes down network nodes in a decreasing order of their nodal degrees. In this
paper, we study two different effects that have been largely missed in the
existing results: (i) some communication networks, like Internet, are too large
for anyone to have global information of their topologies, which makes the
accurate intentional attack practically impossible; and (ii) most attacks in
communication networks are propagated from one node to its neighborhood
node(s), utilizing local network-topology information only. We show that
incomplete global information has different impacts to the intentional attack
in different circumstances, while local information-based attacks can be
actually highly efficient. Such insights would be helpful for the future
developments of efficient network attack/protection schemes.
