SoBig.F and Reed's Law

The proliferation of SoBig.F illustrates the potential negative effects of Reed's Law. The essence of Reed's Law is this: "Networks that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size, i.e. much more rapidly than Metcalfe's square law" (from David Reed's essay That Sneaky Exponential—Beyond Metcalfe's Law to the Power of Community Building).

The SoBig virus (and Love Bug and others) works by exploiting one of the basic pieces of "infrastructure" of group-forming networks on the Internet, the email address book. This means it's replicating through a social network--governed by exponential power of Reed's Law--as much as a physical network. Makes sense; from the virus's point of view attacking a social network allows much more rapid propagation and a greater chance of infection. (I'd guess that one of the main tasks of a virus is to propagate faster than both news about it and patches.)

Which makes me wonder: does Reed's network pose a new kind of security challenge, since programs that attack social networks get the potential benefit of exponential growth?

(For the mathematically inclined, here's a paper on Email Networks and the Spread of Computer Viruses (PDF).)