Describe four ethical issues that arise when storing electronic information about individuals.

Four ethical issues that could arise when strong electronic information about individuals could security, confidentiality, integrity, and implementation. There are many things that people could be choosing to electronically store that would be classified as sensitive or private personal information, and those items could range from credit/debit card numbers, social security numbers, medical records, and much more. If someone was to breach pass your security passwords and/or questions you could have major confidentiality problem on your hands. Which leads us into the second ethical issue of confidentiality. Confidentiality is defined as a duty to protect private information and to only share entrusted information responsibly. Confidentiality and security go hand in hand, so if you have a strong security system set in place such as encryptions, access controls, and data masking. The third ethical issue that may arise when electronically storing individuals private information is integrity. Integrity is ensuring that the data stored on devices is correct and that no unauthorized person or malicious software has altered or destroyed the information in anyway. Common techniques used to maintain integrity include digital signatures, message authentication codes, and data hashing. This leads us into our fourth and final ethical issue, implementation. Implementation is the execution or practice of a plan, method, or any design, idea, model, specification, standard or policy for doing something. As such, implementation is the action that must follow any preliminary thinking for something to actually happen. If the wrong people are put in charge an implementation project such as installing a new security software for financial institutions electronic banking system, then the results could be catastrophic and lead to customers private financial documents being accessed by unauthorized individuals. All four of these topics are vital to cyber security and organizations as a whole to protect sensitive data, prevent financial losses, ensure business continuity, safeguard intellectual property, meet regulatory requirements, maintain customer trust, and defend against evolving cyber threats.

Compare cybersecurity risks in the U.S. and another country.

As we all know every country around the world faces cybercrimes or cyberattacks at some point in time. With the rate of advancements in technology changing everyday, new systems and policies need to be setup to help safeguard against these attacks and crimes. A study performed by SEON combined data from different cybersecurity indices to rank countries in terms of their exposure to cybercrime. The top ranking country for being most cyber secure was Denmark who secured an overall cyber safety score of 8.91. Germany had a cyber score of 8.76, while the US had a score of 8.73. The relatively overall high rank for US was due in part to its first place score in the Global Cybersecurity Index, while also ranking well in terms of overall cybersecurity exposure and strong legislation. With that being said, the US faces many challenges with phishing attacks which is the US’ leading form of cybercrimes. Phishing has become the most prevalent form of cyberthreats with over 500 million attacks reported in 2022. Phishing attacks are described as a type of criminal activity that uses social engineering techniques that enable phishers to attempt fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords, credit card details, national identification information and much more, this is also one of the easiest types of scams to fall victim too. Data has shown that more than 65% of all phishing attack attempts have happened within the US, and has increased since last years 60%. Even though that US is leading the charts in most phishing attempts, research has also showed an alarming year-to-year increase in phishing attempts targeting Canada at a 718%, the United Kingdom at a 269%, Russia at a 199% and Japan at a 92%. For the US and other countries to better counter and manage these attacks they are going to need to get a better understand the risks to better inform policy and strategy and leverage automated tools and threat intel to reduce phishing incidents.