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 cyber ethics and the ways that fundamental ethical theories relate to these core issues.

Reflective Writing Assignment

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The first topic that I have gained a real perspective on was whistleblowing. Before this course if you asked me what a whistleblower was, I would not have been able to answer. After first finding out the definition of a whistleblower, my initial thoughts were that it was bad for someone to be a whistleblower. It could be seen as an act of betrayal and snitching on your fellow employees, boss, or company. After doing the case analysis on it, I have realized that under the right circumstance, whistleblowing is a good thing and that it can be utilized as an ethical tool. There are times when an individual needs to do what is moral even if it means sacrificing their potential job for the safety or freedom of others. The key takeaway I will remember is when I hear or read the term whistleblowing, I will remember to think ethically and that it should not be associated with negative connotation.

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The second topic that will have real influence on myself in the future is professional ethics. In honesty, before this class, I have never really thought about ethical decision making and less about how it can be used in a professional setting. After the case analysis on professional ethics, I understood that many jobs require you to make ethical decisions every day. Some jobs have ethical codes that you must abide by and sign a contract to do your job. They are very important in keeping companies from committing acts that could damage society and individuals from intentionally hurting one another. Even things such as building a website for a company can become unethical as in the situation with Bill Sourour, where he built a website for a pharmaceutical company that turned out to be selling harmful drugs to young girls. A key takeaway from this section is to always be on guard and looking out for unethical situations every day. I might never know when I get put into a situation where my decision could affect someone’s life or put someone else in danger.

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The third key takeaway is about all the different types of ethics we learned about in this course. Before this class, I never put much thought into ethics at all. I basically assumed that ethics was just doing the right thing in general. Now I know there are many tools involved when making ethical decisions and how to use the right one for the circumstances. Basically, I thought that utilitarianism was all there was to ethics. Whatever the right thing to do was the action that benefitted the most people. Now I know that there is ethics involved with care and how you treat someone, respecting another person’s ability to make the right decision, social contracts, and that playing a certain role can also be ethical. There is much more going on when making an ethical decision than I previously knew. My takeaway from this is to always remember that there is not only one right way to make a decision. There can be different paths you can take in order to come up with the right answer and be ethical.