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
This course has covered many thought-provoking topics for me. As I completed the case analysis, the topics I engaged with gave me a better point of view and allowed me to think again about some of the opinions I already had on the topic. A lot of my own opinions have changed, and sometimes they became more engrained in my position on a topic. The three main topics I would like to demonstrate engagement over the course of this semester with this class are Professional Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Information Warfare.
Professional Ethics was really something I never even thought much about in the first place. Simply put, I did not have much of an opinion on it at all because of this. All I ever thought about was that when I get a job in the future, I would be doing whatever the employer wanted all of the time no questions asked, not because I would force myself to, but because I never thought that a company would ever do anything that goes against my own ethics. Because of the work that I completed and the case that was presented to me for the case analysis, I can now see that there may very well be a time when I am confronted with an issue between me and my company ethically. It has really opened my eyes to see the problems that can occur within a company and made me think about how I will need to be vigilant in my future. In the same boat, it reminds me of Corporate Social Responsibility.
With Corporate Social Responsibility, I had already formulated a fairly stern opinion on the matter of obviously being in favor of the consumers, and it did in fact firmly engrain this opinion even more after the case analysis. I had already held the idea that since consumers were required to exist for corporations to exist, and corporations are not required for consumers to existing, it is obvious that consumers should be placed in front of those that provide the choices, especially when corporations hold pseudo monopolies by being the main proprietor of goods of a single type. In the case of Equifax holding this monopoly, and especially since it is a monopoly that can’t be entitled to allow consumers to not be a part of it, it shows how much power these companies hold, and it is easy to see how fast or simple a corporation can be blinded by this power to hold it and stay in the top, rather than being truthful and help its users regain a hold on their own personal information that got leaked. This applies to almost any company nowadays since credit cards can be saved, addresses, and other personally identifiable information. I now sternly believe and will continue to in my future that if a company does not respect its consumers as its main supplier of income like it should then you should not be a proprietor of that company in any way. Finally, the one topic that was really eye-opening was the topic of Information Warfare.
I had already known about the Cambridge Analytical scandal with Facebook, and I had essentially let it go and not really formed any strong opinions about it, but the readings included in the Case analysis were so incredibly eye-opening that it would be a sin to not end my essay off with discussing how much it changed me. It is fair to say that I stand slightly conservative on the political spectrum, and it would also be lying if I did not fall to certain Information Warfare ploys done by the Russians. The readings had me so taken aback that I had to reconsider if I just wanted to be Cybersecurity as my major, or if I wanted to go into Information Warfare and Phycological Warfare. Though I am still choosing to stick with traditional IT help desk Cybersecurity, I will now go through life with an unbending skepticism about everything I read online and continue to do research on the status of Russian information warfare and how social media plays a role in Information Warfare. In the future, if I am not satisfied with being a Security Architect overseeing the forming and basis of a company’s security, I may enhance my career by studying this new age of warfare.
Here is a few Case Analyses that I completed over the course of the semester: