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
Upon acquiring proficiency in the moral tools and module case analysis, three distinct module cases were found to have left an indelible impression upon me. The three cases under consideration are those pertaining to user data, cyberconflict, and information warfare.
The infamous scandals regarding to Facebook’s user data in Module 2 and information warfare in Module 7 are indicative of the considerable ethical breaches committed by this social media platform. Truthfully, a coveted occupation for computer science and IT students is being employed at Facebook Working within F.L.A.G. (Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Google) is always the most enviable thing to computer related students. F.L.A.G are the most popular four high-tech companies to computer related fresh graduates. The four “holy temples” are famous for high salary, plenty available positions, high reputation in the industry. Facebook maintains its dominant position as the leader of social media platform worldwide. Facebook’s careless sharing of user data is the subject of the user data case. Facebook spread false information to engage in information warfare and influenced the results of the 2016 presidential election.
In the User Data Case, I discovered: Initially, I believed that the tech industry should take the bulk of the victims’ responsibility in cases of data breach. Following the user data analysis, , I am aware that we cannot arbitrarily decide that it is totally wrong for social media companies to mine users’ data, since we check “Agree” button to the data protection statement of the website when we register to use the social media platform. Additionally, everyone has access to the data the user posted. Hence, Facebook sold users’ data to Cambridge Analytica. As a result of this scandal, Facebook executives continue to argue that this is not a “breach”. I’ll have to remind myself in the future that we cannot rely on any tech company once the data is out of our control. Data must be protected by us alone. For instance, we might try to make our social media profile private and ensure that the people we interact with online are decent. Likewise, pay additional attention to any fresh requests, connections, etc.
From Information warfare case, we can see that some data appears to be pointless for ourselves, such as our shopping or chat data, and their usage is unimaginable to us. However, Facebook used user’s information for political advertising. Unbelievably, Facebook’s voting design can have a significant impact on the outcome of a national election with only a small change. Additionally, Facebook contributed significantly to Trump’s $250 million in online fundraising. Information warfare has unimaginable power. I should have learned in the past that information warfare is a two-edged sword. As technicians employed by high-tech businesses, it is our duty to uphold social responsibility and take appropriate actions to ensure the fair election environment, such as removing links to false news sources from programs and websites.
From Cyber-conflict case, I learned that we should realize that cyber warfare in modern era and the differences from conventional models of wars. Future conflicts will see widespread use of cyber weapons like Stuxnet, and there will be more cyber wars between conflict nations like the one between Iran and Israel. Future wars should involve both soldiers fighting for their lives on the front lines and attackers attacking and destroying the industrial systems of the enemy nation with potent cyberweapons, such as steal information, wreck trains, contaminate water sources, collapse power grids, etc. The front line must be less horrifically scaled than the invisible attack. That should serve as myself’s guide in the future, and we should push for the establishment of specific regulations regarding the use of cyber weapons based on moral principles.