This robustness against random failure has also a down side: the networks are particularly vulnerable to a targeted attack that systematically removes the hubs, that is, the nodes in the network with the highest degrees (Albert, Jeong, et al. 2000). The precise fraction of removed hubs under which the network breaks down depends on the details of the degree distribution. For the interactome, we find that removing ~30% of the nodes is sufficient to destroy the network completely
