Companies are constantly at risk this day in age due to the technological advances society has reached. Electronic information stored in a companys database concerning consumers and members personal information are very valuable. Cyber criminals will perform any cyber attack neccessary to gain access to any companies information. There are many ethical issues that arise when storing electronic information about individuals, the first one is incident response. Incident response is how the company responds to a data breach or cyber attack. Does the company inform its users about the data breach incident? How the company conducts itself after an incident is crucial, especially when consumers personal information is at hand. If the company chooses not to inform its consumers about the data breach within a considerable amount of time or at all it is very unethical.

Another ethical issue that occurs when storing information is privacy. Since an organization has personal information about their customers, they can easily lend their information to other companies without notifying their consumers. It is not ethical for a company to give out their users personal information without notifying them or having it written in legal documentation about sharing their information with other organizations. Just think about it, would you want your friend telling all your business to other people? Integrity is another ethical issue that is imposed upon when dealing with storing electronic information. Unauthorized individuals can alter personal information maliciously. For example, a hacker may be hired to go inside a person’s tax returns and put fraudulent information on there.

The last ethical issue I will discuss here is confidentiality. Confidentiality is the control of who has access to a customer’s information in a company. If there is no restricting measures on who is allowed to view a consumers information, that means anyone can view and use that information for wrongful reasons. It is only ethically right to have confidentiality in a business or else the company is allowing cyber criminals to view customers data.

Being considered the “strongest” country in the world, the United States has a lot cyber security risks associated with foreign cyber attacks. The top cyber attacks on U.S. soil in 2019 were social hacking, ransomware and distributed denial of service attacks. Compared to Ghana, the top cyber attacks in 2016 were phishing attacks, email hacking and website attacks. Not all of these cyber attacks can be purely eliminated but they can be reduced by properly storing electronic information ethically and practicing security measures.

Sources: https://www.getgds.com/resources/blog/cybersecurity/what-are-the-biggest-cyber-security-threats-in-2019

www.interactiveservices.com/understanding-cybersecurity-ethics-in-the-workplace/

https://www.mfwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/cyber-security-Report.pdf

https://www.mfwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/cyber-security-Report.pdf