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.

End-of-Course Reflection

My time in Cybersecurity Ethics has been both challenging and enlightening. This course has deepened my existing opinion of social media, enlightened me about the various ethical philosophies that we studied, and informed me about events that test a person’s morality and ethics, like the events of the pharmaceutical quiz code created by Bill Sourour.

I have already had an ambivalent opinion regarding social media, but the content of this course has only deepened my dislike for it. While social media has been an excellent tool for connecting to and interacting with others worldwide, I feel that much of today’s usage is either for politics or those who care more about likes and followers than anything else. The seventh module of this course has shown one of my points as it talks about topics like Cambridge Analytica’s usage of Facebook data to influence the vote or Facebook’s (possibly unintended) engagement in information warfare during the 2016 presidential election. Besides politics, much of social media is filled with those who care more about getting likes and followers for every moment, movement, or action they take.

Throughout this course, we have studied various ethical philosophies, many of which conflict. Consequentialism or Utilitarianism focuses on whether an action is good or bad depending on the consequences of the action; Deontology or Kantianism focuses on the reasoning behind the actions taken and if the action should be executed. Contractarianism focuses on the unseen social contract between all members of society as members of society, while Ubuntu focuses on the moral goodness of realizing one’s humanity and that our interdependence on one another, including our rights and individuality, comes from our communities. Ethics of care focuses on our relationships and interdependence with one another, while Confucianism focuses on our roles to each other and the overall path we walk in life. The final ethical philosophy is Virtue Ethics which looks at morality as an aspect of personal character and doing the right thing in the right situation for the right reasons. My takeaway from the content of these ethical philosophies is that there are different ethical views for every action that one could take and that everyone follows an ethical philosophy somehow. Diverse ethical perspectives could apply to many different situations and lead people to take other steps.

Events like the pharmaceutical quiz code created by Bill Sourour have informed me of the ethical challenges that can happen from anywhere and at any time. Sourour was told to design the code for a pharmaceutical quiz, and he did his job and followed his client’s specifications. He didn’t see any issues until his coworkers had relayed information regarding the examination and the effects of the drug that his code was created to push. He had seen signs that should have been popped up as “red flags” in his mind but didn’t think past those ideas until he was told that teenage girls prescribed the drug had committed suicide. It was that information that had led to Sourour quitting the company. My takeaway from this story is there may come a time when an event like this may happen to me, and I would need to think about how to handle the situation while staying true to my moral compass.