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

Reflective Writing Assignment

The first topic that I would like to reflect back on was my first Case Analysis assignment in the course. The subject of this assignment was on Privacy and the usage of Google Street View as a service. This assignment had an overbearing effect on the rest of the course for me because it allowed me to familiarize myself with the layout of these assignments and the issue of privacy, which was a reoccurring topic. I took the stance that Google failed to meet their contractual expectations as a powerful company due to their failure to prioritize the privacy of civilians. This case also allowed me to learn more about Contractarianism and get to really understand the philosophy of it in order to utilize it as my moral reasoning tool. Reading back though my work, I definitely would consider this particular Case Analysis to be one of my better ones despite it being my first one. My points and reasoning in the paragraphs are well-fleshed out and multi-faceted. This is something I would neglect to do as well in later assignments, and part of that would probably have to be due to the fact that I really felt like I could grasp the virtues of Contractarianism. Additionally, this particular assignment will be very relevant to the things that I will be dealing with in my future career. My major is cybersecurity and privacy is always one of the most hotly debated topics in the field. The biggest point of contention is the United States’ inherent lack of dedicated privacy laws. Once I am working int the field, it will be interesting to see if any type of legislation comes into fruition, because I personally think it is well overdue.

My second topic that I would like to reflect back onto would be my Case Analysis on professional ethics. This is probably the assignment that I am the proudest of looking back, and it can be attributed to how interesting I found the topic. Before switching into cybersecurity, I was planning on pursuing a career in medicine. So, the topic revolving around a crossroads between coding companies and pharmaceutical companies was already personally intriguing. For this particular assignment, I assumed the position that the pharmaceutical company was the most at fault for the repercussions of the quiz due to their blatant manipulation of clients in order to spread the usage of their drug, with Deontology as my tool. Additionally, I argued that the narrator should have taken a different course of action but could not have been logically expected to comprehend the eventual consequences of his actions. I still fully stand by this stance that I took, as I’ve come to learn through further research into the topic that the pharmaceutical industry is filled with companies that operate using predatory practices and a general disregard for what issues their drugs could cause. Unfortunately, the guy who was tasked with coding the quiz fell right into on of these predatory schemes and will have to shoulder that guilt for the rest of his life.

The third and last topic that I want to reflect back onto would be my overall takeaway from the course “Cybersecurity Ethics” as a whole. Going into this semester, I had taken a lot of different cybersecurity courses and some computer science courses, but all of them were more focused on the fundamental aspects of the course. This involved things more concerned with the technical side of the field and practical examinations to make sure that I knew how to operate different kinds of software and hardware that I would use in the future. But for this course, this was the first time that I got a small glimpse into the ethical issues that can arise in cybersecurity. Learning about different major cases and the ethical/moral crossroads that this field can generate definitely gave me much better insight into how my future career will be. Additionally, I was introduced to a lot of different kinds of moral reasonings and philosophies, some of which I had never heard of before. But now that I am aware of them, I’ve spent time in my personal life thinking about how they apply to me and different situations that I encounter day-to-day. So, my all-encompassing takeaway from this course would be that I am very happy that I took it, and I probably learned the most from it out of all of my cybersecurity courses, which I was not expecting at all.