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
Thomas Roeseler
PHIL 355E
Instructor Nathaniel Nicol
7 December 2023
The first topic is in module five that I found interesting and definitely gained a lot more knowledge about was whistleblowing. I found the topic of whistleblowing interesting because some of the examples of it showed a perspective that I never really thought of even though it is a very important perspective to look from. That perspective is that people are not only loyal to their country or employer and boss, they can be loyal to ethics and morals. This concept is known as rational loyalty. There can be both moral and immoral cases of whistleblowing, in the case analysis about Manning and Collateral Murder, it was a case of moral whistleblowing because there was wrongdoings going on by the United States military, and Manning chose to whistleblow and bring attention to those wrongdoings in hopes of something being done about it. Rational loyalty should be encouraged because it helps promote ethical behavior and accountability of actions. In the readings, it is suggested that organizations and companies should encourage an environment with rational loyalty. Organizational loyalty should not be over loyalty to morals and ethics and because organizational loyalty and the public interest can be very different, it is important to know where the line is for certain things and decide what should be happening and what should not be happening.
The next topic that I found pretty interesting was in module three, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The case analysis in this module was about the Equifax breach in 2017 that involved the compromise of sensitive personal information of about 143 million people. Some of the information that was compromised included credit card information and social security numbers. The outcomes from this breach affected the consumers in multiple ways. They were at risk of identity theft, financial loss, and also emotional stress caused from the breach because of the worries of possible outcomes that would affect them greatly. Something important that came from this case analysis was the idea of how businesses should focus on ethics, not just maximizing their profits.
The final topic that I found pretty interesting in this course was in module seven, information warfare. This is a very interesting topic to me because of all the uncertainty with it and the things that can happen that aren’t expected. In the case analysis for this module, the focus was on Facebook and the 2016 presidential election. There is potential that Facebook played a role in the outcome of the 2016 election. Information warfare usually involves either information or misinformation that is used to try to gain an advantage or influence opinions in politics. For an action to be considered information warfare, it depends on the intention of the people involved, the approach, the information used, the technological involvement, the impact it has on the targets, and others. Facebook contributed to the spread of misinformation and allowed it to be spread on the platform because their algorithms had challenges regulating political content and ads effectively. Because of this on Facebook, there is an argument that they interfered with the election because of all the misinformation and targeted political advertisements. Also, because of this, Facebook engaged in information warfare because of the targeted political ads that were used to try to gain an advantage for a party over the opposing party.
My takeaways from this class are that I learned a lot, especially the use of ethics into cases that involved cybersecurity concerns. I believe that in the future, the knowledge I gained from this course will benefit by allowing me to know more about ethics and choosing to be ethical instead of unethical and being able to point the difference out between the two.