Four ethical issues that arise when storing electronic information about individuals are described as being but not limited to security aspects, programmed threats, hackers, and privacy concerns. When storying individuals’ electronic data, there will always be a possibility that there will be security breaches or attempts of that. With security aspects, there are a lot of times when viruses and international spying will be a concern. However, according to Spafford, Heaphy, and Ferbrache, by implementing five aspects, it will help with the issue. These core aspects are described to be
- Privacy and confidentiality
- Integrity—assuring that data and programs are not modified without proper authority
- Unimpaired service
- Consistency—ensuring that the data and behavior we see today will be the same tomorrow
- Controlling access to resources
As previously stated, many threats can happen, including programmed threats. Threats such as these are correctly used to challenge computer security.
- viruses, which cannot run on their own, but rather are inserted into other computer programs;
- worms which can move from machine to machine across networks, and may have parts of themselves running on different machines;
- Trojan horses which appear to be one sort of program, but actually are doing damage behind the scenes;
- logic bombs which check for particular conditions and then execute when those conditions arise; and
- bacteria or rabbits which multiply rapidly and fill up the computer’s memory.
In the USA, there are a significant amount of cybersecurity commitments, and they are one of the leading countries around it. This could correlate with the fact that the US is one of the five nations that deal with the most significant source of cyber attacks. According to the Cyber Crime Nation Typologies: K-Means Clustering of Countries Based on Cyber Crime Rates, “The United States is targeted the most by phishing attacks, suffering 60% of worldwide phishing volumes (RSA, 2014). When an individual falls victim to a phishing attack, the average amount lost is $1,800 (Cyveillance, 2008). However, businesses are often targeted, which results in a loss of $20,070 per business if successful (Ponemon Institute, 2013). Among some of the top sources of phishing attacks include China, Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Brazil (APWG, 2014).”