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

Throughout this course, Cybersecurity Ethics has taught me many things whether it be related to cybersecurity and data privacy, or real-life situations and lessons on how to be a better person. There are plenty of lessons that I have learned throughout this semester, but three specific lessons stand out to me.

Of all the ethical tools, consequentialism/utilitarianism spoke to me the most and the image of pulling the lever on the train tracks made me rethink a lot of choices made by myself and friends/family around me. However, the majority of my appreciation for this ethical tool lies in the reading. Understand by Ted Chiang was not only a very interesting read and kept me extremely entertained throughout, but this story in particular helped me understand the teachings behind its respected ethical tool more than the others. I understand that the train tracks example was as basic as it could be, but the events between Leon and Reynolds made me think about and truly understand what it means and what it feels like to place yourself in the responsibility of others’ well-being. Leon, because he chose to improve his own mind and create a language for himself to think in, exhibits the action of not pulling the lever and letting five people die instead of just one. Oppositely, the actions of Reynolds and how he is using his power is like actively pulling the lever to kill one person while saving five people; he made an active decision to protect the greater number of people rather than passively letting them die. This layout of decisions helped me to understand how to help the most people as possible and made me realize how wrong it is to actively choose to remove myself from problematic situations.

In today’s digital society, the threat of losing one’s personal information grows more and more rapidly each day. In Michael Zimmer’s But the data is already public, we learn that no matter how much one may protect or de-identify their social data, someone out there is able and willing to re-identify and capture your personal information. In Zimmer’s article, the 2011 Harvard College freshman class had their de-identified Facebook information legally released to the public as part of a researching project. Identifying information was either deleted or encoded, and Harvard College was labeled as a North Eastern American college. After this information was released to the public, someone was able to identify the college itself as well as some of the students and their respective information after the deletion and decoding. This dataset only “reveals the fragility of the presumed privacy of the subjects under study” and brings to light how badly we can get screwed over for posting too much information on social media. Because someone is able to re-identify our data and that our information is never 100% secure on the internet, I can now realize how dangerous it is to be so open online. This article taught me that account passwords and fancy usernames are not the only thing needed to keep my data safe, and that the more private I am online, the less likely I am to have my information stolen.

Finally, the third most important topic to me is found in the case analysis on professional ethics. In The code I’m still ashamed of, Bill Sourour talks about a code he had written in the year 2000 to aid a pharmaceutical company. Sourour was hired to create an online quiz that would point teenage girls in the direction to whatever medication would be most applicable to their needs. Well what the client did not inform Sourour of at first, is that no matter what answers were selected, the same medication was generated. Because there are so many rules and regulations in accordance to advertising medication in Canada (where this company was based), this client used the quiz as a “general information” cloak while still gaining financial benefit. Sadly, a girl that ordered this medicine fell subject to the side effects of this medicine which include suicidal thoughts and depression which led to her suicide. This series of events really captures how cruel the digital world is and how far someone will go for financial gain. Although the situations are different, this article helped clarify the importance of being hacked scammed online. On one end, someone may think they are donating money to a charity for children in need of physical therapy, whereas the charity is really a 40 year-old man that makes money off of the malicious acts against innocent people. A lesson from this is simply to be careful as to what you are getting into in the digital world. Not all sources are trustworthy and some may even pose serious consequences regardless of your intent.

Since Cybersecurity is all about protecting the digital public and defending from foreign malicious attacks, my Case Analysis on User Data is a great connection to that theory.