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.

Reflection Assignment

After a long and stressful semester with multiple cyber classes I am happy to say that it has come to an end. But in this cyber class I have learned a lot and was challenged to think critically about ethics in cybersecurity. During the course of the semester there were three different topics that I enjoyed. The first is privacy from module 1, the second is user data from module 2, and the last one is about Stuxnet and cyberconflict from module 6.

In the discussion board about privacy, I said that it is very important and is something people seek to have even at a young age. I also said that everyone deserves their own privacy until they do something immoral or illegal in which that means they can’t really be trusted. Looking back at my discussion prompt, I think I feel the same way when it comes to privacy. Everyone deserves their own privacy but if they are using it for immoral reasons, they shouldn’t be upset when their privacy is compromised because they aren’t making the best decisions with their privacy. I still believe that privacy is good and beneficial for everyone’s mental and health and a little “me time” goes a long way if one is feeling stressed/drained. A takeaway I would want my future self to remember is how valuable a person’s privacy is and how it should always be respected. Privacy has always been important to me and is the reason I decided to reflect back on it for this assignment.

The next discussion topic I enjoyed writing about was user data from back in module 2. I talked about how important it is to protect user data on social media sites and apps and how vulnerable users personal information is to attacks like fraud, identity theft, and other malicious attacks. I like what I said about how its not only the sites and apps responsibility to protect users data but its also on the users themselves too. Social media sites mining data was the next part of the discussion topic and I still think that if users agree to data protection statements, it is wrong to be mining their data because the users should be the ones to determine what data if any get collected. I still feel the same way today about the things I said in the module 2 discussion board and wouldn’t change or add anything. The takeaway I would want my future self to remember would be how social media sites and apps are ran today data wise and compare it to how it will be in the future to see if things gotten better or worse.

In the last topic I chose the one from module 6 because I found the article about Stuxnet to be pretty interesting and I enjoyed reading it. In my response I said that Stuxnet was definitely an act of cyberwarfare after looking up the definition. Stuxnet being described as a 500-kilobyte computer worm that is malicious, spreads on its own, and can spread through computers that aren’t connected to the internet as well, shows how dangerous it can be but also that it is an act of cyberwarfare. The people responsible for creating a virus of that caliber while trying to remain undetected shows the bad intent they had behind it and because of that it cannot be deemed as being ethically justified. I think that was the strongest part of my response because it really shows how unethical the whole Stuxnet virus really is. A takeaway I would want my future self to remember from this topic is to always try to have some type of anti-virus software on my computer and to try and keep up with new/dangerous viruses when they are detected so that I can prepare my devices for protection from them.