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 taught me a very good lesson when it comes to applying ethics to the world around me. At first, I was confused and nervous. I just got into the course late and I wanted to catch up as soon as I could so I wouldn’t stay behind everyone else. I rushed my way there and Module 2 was when the idea of applying ethics to my way of thinking started to come after failing those assignments there.

Module 2 was the time when I started to slowly understand what to actually do in the course. Utilitarianism and its discussion board had me stuck for a while, and I kept wondering what exactly I was doing wrong. I had the facts and everything straight, but what about my own ethical view? It seems that I did not had that down and was confused with my own meaning of Utilitarianism. I never dove deeper into it, but the moral theory itself deepened my own moral thoughts and showed me all of the cons of certain actions I might make in the future. Should I stay slow on the freeway with a car behind me? Do I speed up? Even if I am slow on the freeway and as a consequence, people will move out of the way and drive faster to get around me. In return however, they become happier and don’t have to wait for me to keep going slow. 

Learning about Contractarianism was also an enlightening experience regarding my developing moral thoughts. It allowed me to think more clearly about my own actions, especially with the career I’m going towards. By being a penetration tester, I still must follow and abide by moral regulations even if it means I’m still technically breaking the company rules that are present. I should follow them with my duty as a penetration tester and shouldn’t overstep by breaking those moral regulations in myself. This subject deepened my understanding of how scalable and impactful my actions could be, and how I shouldn’t act like I rule the world over other people by conducting penetration tests. These tests should be an experience for both me and employees, not just for me and wanting more damage or unrest from employees. Rather, I should be shooting for bonds between employees and understanding them when it comes to test results and how to protect themselves.

Lastly, Ruism helps me guide my own decisions when it comes to the career of choice that I wanted. To not only serve to benefit not only the company I may work for, but for everyone else with general security awareness and preventing attacks as much as I can, it allows me to feel like I am providing help for societal harmony. By not only aiding everyone else in return for my job, I am making sure that everyone is aware of what to do and how they could prevent specific cyberattacks I might try in the future against them, overall training them and ensuring that the employees are trained well on security awareness.

While I did have my ups and downs during the course, I found that I still had a lot of fun expressing more about my own thoughts through words. I never really do this often, and I typically follow what’s provided and do the assignment from there. Open-ended questions through the class have broadened my view and allows me to think more critically over my work.