Cybersecurity Ethics

This course examines ethical issues relevant to ethics for cybersecurity professionals, including privacy, professional code of conduct, practical conflicts between engineering ethics and business practices, individual and corporate social responsibility, ethical hacking, information warfare, and cyberwarfare. Students will gain a broad understanding of central issues in cyberethics and the ways that fundamental ethical theories relate to these core issues.

Course Material

Over the course of 12 weeks in Cyber Security Ethics PHIL355E there were plenty of times on reflect on different topics. Three that stuck out to me were Privacy, Data Ethics and Whistleblowing. Each of these topics had led me to different assignments that caused me to think about each individual topic. I believe that the more I researched each one my thoughts had been changed also and gave me “takeaways” to think about in the future. All topics can be considered equally important and need to be thought about on for all day to day thoughts and situations.

Privacy is a major topic in Cybersecurity and should be one of the top thoughts on everyone’s mind when it comes to the subject. I always found the subject interesting because quite frankly we have gotten lazy with time on how much we care about our own privacy. It is so important to remember that we need to maintain this as an essential part of our lives. If we do not have privacy then we loose a portion of ourselves. Researching this topic had me thinking about the future and how I need start thinking about what needs to be more private. This could go from social media accounts to clicking on links that need to be looked at more cautiously.

Data Ethics can be tricky once it gets to the higher levels of big data. It can be used against us and be mined for big companies for advertising purposes and collecting profits off of us users. The example that we researched in the course was Facebook getting caught with using our own personal data to be sold off even though users wanted to opt out of the targeted advertising. Clearly this caused a public outrage and it got a lot of people thinking about the subject. It also made me think about my own social media accounts and how I need to lock mine down a little bit more. This is not only for my sake of being overly exposed to advertising companies but also for my own sanity and not allowing so much information to be exposed online.

Whistleblowing was an important topic that was covered in the course. Edward Snowden was used for the example for this topic and it made the topic of ethics very important. His dilemma was if he should expose what the NSA was doing to the American public or should he keep is position with his job and continue to spy on the American public with what the programs they were using secretly. His ethical situation was something to think about nothing only on that massive scale he had to deal with but it could be applied to a lot of other events in life. Even normal people such as myself have to be put into situations like this from time to time. It is important to think about Edward Snowden’s situation and think about ethical predicaments from day to day problems.