There are several different sides to cyber security and the discipline is extremely broad that can span over all other disciplines. For instance, any discipline that uses any sort of digital technology needs cyber security to keep themselves protected will they operate that technology. The most important side of cyber security is the ethical side. Individuals who work in cyber security have access to almost every part of the network they are working on and the resources on that network. Those individuals must abide by a set of ethical principles to ensure the credibility, integrity, and the availability of the network’s resources are intact. Throughout this cyber security ethics course there were three discussions that I have personally engaged the most with during the semester, including data ethics, corporate social responsibility, and information warfare.

Starting with data ethics, it is the most common thing that a student will hear about in every cyber security class and that is there are ethical principles that must be followed when trusted with access to confidential information. This can explain the white hat, grey hat, and black hat hackers, where white hat is ethical with getting permission and not altering or stealing information. Black hats on the other hand will alter or steal the information for their own personal gain. Before this module, I never understood how data mining was a bad thing. An example is that advertisements will never go away and why would I not want to see advertisements that better suit my personality and interests, like I am a man, and I should not be getting advertisements about feminine products. However, I can now see that data mining can be a bad thing when the corporation collecting the information starts to collect more sensitive information. The corporate social responsibility plays a role in data ethics in the way that corporations have a social responsibility to abide by their own ethical guidelines. It never made sense to me why Facebook would violate their own ethical principles to sell their user’s information to data mining companies. This module shed some light on the idea that responsibilities can only be granted to individuals and not to a term or word, like “business.” Since business is an idea and not a physical thing it cannot be granted responsibilities, instead businessmen are to be held responsible for any violations. This opened my eyes to how instead of blaming Facebook for the issues they caused, blame the issue on Mark Zuckerberg or Sherly Sandberg, Facebooks chief operating officer. Finally, looking at information warfare, it does not surprise me that politicians are wanting to spread misinformation about their opponents to gain an advantage in an election. Something that I noticed was that it is not as common to hear about a business or corporation spreading misinformation about their competitors, this could be because they follow their corporate social responsibilities. This module helped deepen my understanding of how important it is to fake check information that is found on social media because it being more common to see fake information on social media platforms.

Overall, the experiment of this philosophy course has be very informative and helpful with understand several different ethical standpoints on several different topics relating to cyber security. A couple things that I would like my future self to remember is to never trust Facebook because they have been the main example of what not to do for almost all out modules. Something else to understand for future references is that business side to the topics discussed because that is what seems to be more needed in the field. Making sure to fully comprehend professional ethics, CSR, data privacy, can all play a huge role in making sure I do not end up in jail or that I can keep a job without violating any ethical guidelines.