Professionals who work in the cybersecurity field have a multitude of issues they must worry about but some of the most prevalent topics are ethical issues rather than physical or cyberattacks. Some relevant examples are consumer privacy, confidentiality, whistleblowing, and data retention/deletion.

While consumer privacy and confidentiality seem as though they can go hand in hand a difference can be found when looking at internal factors as opposed to external. Consumer privacy is about protecting consumer data from outside threats such as data leaks. When customers allow these businesses to store and process their data they have a legal and ethical duty to protect this data. However, there have been multiple occasions that companies have been found selling this data to advertisement companies, in turn, allowing these companies to perform targeted advertising.

Confidentiality on the other hand should be viewed as an internal issue. Companies have their own intellectual properties and some even work with government agencies such as the DOD. Situations like the ones presented places a significant amount of trust on not only the company but the employees as well. Confidentiality focuses on mitigating the risk of internal secrets becoming public and a connection can be to one of the previous examples; whistleblowing. The act of whistleblowing is releasing information about unethical and/or illegal activity and even has written laws to protect the whistleblower from retaliation.

Some relevant issue with data retention/deletion is the length of time the data is saved. How long data is saved is very important because the longer data is saved the more opportunity for attacks against it exists. The method of how it’s stored as well as what types of encryptions they use is important as well. Policy has been put in place to ensure proper deletion happens when data is no longer needed or it is archived in a secure manner in some cases such as medical data.

While comparing the risks that America faces when it comes to cyber attacks, the amount of countries that are correlative are few and far between. As one of the biggest economic as well as military powers in the world, America not only faces advanced persistent threats from foreign entities but, the data of citizens can be very beneficial to another country, for example Russia. As of now Russia has a significant presence in the cyber space with America, this year alone multiple Russian hackers have been added to the FBI Cyber’s most wanted list for ransomware and hacktivist attacks. While having similar issues China has a massive difference on how they handle their cyberspace policies, the biggest being The Golden Shield project also dubbed “The Great Firewall” which regulates a significant part of their internet usage. Such regulations stifle net neutrality but can also serve to make what space available fortified from attacks.