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.

Reflective Writing Assignment

In this course the three topics that I engaged with were Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in the elections, cyberconflict and discussion of informational friction.

Cambridge Analytica was a firm that did political consulting and worked for the Trump campaign. What they did was gather up to 87 million profiles from Facebook. They were able to do this through using a Facebook app that was created by the Russian-American researcher Aleksandr Kogan. Essentially, what this app did was collect data on the Facebook users that took the quiz as well as all of the friends of those users. This was a violation of Facebooks policy but Cambridge Analytica did it anyway. Some additional details was that Cambridge was a shell for this organization called the SCL Group. The SCL Group is a public relations firm that works for militaries, politicians as well as governments throughout the world.  Additionally, it was Steve Bannon who convinced conservative megadonors Rebekah and Robert Mercer to fund Cambridge Analytica. A takeaway I took from this topic was a greater appreciation for how data can be collected on the Internet.

For the second one, cyberconflict, I did not fully have a grasp on the details surrounding the cyberconflict between Israel and Iran. Before I took this class, I did have some idea of cyberconflict between Israel and Iran through the case of Stuxnet. In that case it is alleged that US and Israel were involved in a cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. What I did not know about was that there have been additional attacks between the two countries. For example, there have been an attack on the Hillel Yaffe Hospital in Hadera (which is in western Israel) as well as an attack on Iran’s network of petrol supply. Learning more about the details of the different attacks that have occurred between the two countries is something that I did not know about before taking this class. A takeaway I took from this was greater knowledge about Israeli – Iranian conflict.

For the third topic, informational friction, I had not been exposed to this term before this class began. Informational friction as discussed in the work “The 4^th Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality” by Luciano Floridi has to do with forces that conflict with information flowing within a certain area of the infosphere. The author presents a situation in which someone draws the curtains in their living room. In this situation the author states that one is increasing the informational friction in their environment. In this situation someone outside of the house will have more difficulty observing what is happening inside the house (the information). This example shows us a real world example of informational friction in action. A takeaway I took from this was a new term to use in my vocabulary.

In summary Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in the elections, cyberconflict and informational friction are all topics that I learned more about in this class. For two of the topics (Cambridge Analytica and cyberconflict) I did have some previous experience, however my thoughts on this topic have gained nuance. For the third topic, informational friction, this was a new term and my knowledge/thoughts on this deepened. Finally, through these three topics, I took away greater knowledge of the philosophical aspects of privacy, cyberconflict and information warfare.