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

Reflection

This course work focuses on data handling, transmission, safeguarding, usage, and relationships with the people who own the data. Without the data, businesses will not have any means of operating. It will only make sense to place a higher safety net on data and its handling. This is where l come in as a cybersecurity professional.

Privacy

Privacy is a qualified fundamental human right and has always been a sensitive topic of discussion. As explained in the course reading, individuals or groups can seclude themselves and express themselves selectively. Privacy is become one of the biggest problems with no solution in plain sight in the present electronic age. At the hub of the internet culture is an urge to want to find everything about everyone. The information gathered about an individual becomes a valuable asset as people intend to trade and do commerce. In these trading and business conduct, someone drops the ball on safeguarding the data, where violations occur. Without these data, there will be absolutely no way of arriving at conclusions on some pertinent issues but the issues of privacy and mishandling. In the course reading titled, “even cheating dirtbags deserve privacy: the Ashley Madison hack shows we’ve reached peak sex shaming,” by Mary Elizabeth Williams talks about the hack that exposed private citizens’ sex life. In my opinion, one’s sex life should be one of the most private things ever, and that should not be misconstrued because I am against cheating. That being said, I will not appreciate my spouse hanging out on Ashley Madison, and if his name ever appeared in the leak, he had some explaining to do. Also, I will agree that he has lost his privacy after that incident. As said, “you cannot eat your cake and have it back.” The individual’s responsibility is to redeem themselves and not the community’s duty to go around shaming people. Cheating dirtbags had a choice between privacy, respect, and shaming, and they made a choice.

Data Ethics

Data has become an appreciable asset for many organizations, promising improved operations and new business opportunities. However, data has increased access to sensitive information that, when processed, can directly jeopardize the privacy of individuals and violate data protection laws. Data Ethics builds on the substructure provided by computer and information ethics, but at the same time, they refine the approach of shifting information-centric to being data-centric. For instance, Data Ethics focuses more on third-party practices with individuals’ data, while information ethics spans more broadly to media, journalism, library, and information science. It amazes me that Facebook is the largest social media platform, collects roughly one million data points of sensitive information every minute, and uses this personal data for targeted advertisement and loses it. Unless one stays entirely off the grid, their data will be captured someway somehow. These agencies’ responsibility is to place a higher safety measure on personnel data as the internet is not as safe as we always thought it to be.

Cyber Conflict

This topic has been one of the interesting topics I have studied so far based on its impact on the world and my career. In recent years cyberspace has become a global security concern. Large-scale attacks have evidenced a new layer to transnational interaction and modern Conflict: Cyberwarfare. Cyber Conflict is a fast-changing strategic problem for nation-states and lacks an adequate policy framework to manage its implications. Technological advancement has led the world to a sphere where physical interactions are eliminated in everything we do, from gaming to shopping to family gatherings, especially during a pandemic season as we have. Time and location are gradually becoming irrelevant. This advancement has also injected changes to how conflicts are handled. A few decades ago, wars and Conflict were a massive physical interaction; in the present age, countries are attacking each other from million miles away. Cyber conflicts occur and develop within technologies that were mainly designed for commercial transactions, created to favor independence, obscurity, and worldwide interconnectivity. The world needs to police itself, and as an upcoming cybersecurity professional, it will be my job to help our leaders make the best decision and judgments regarding cyber Conflict daily

Corporate social responsibility

Prioritization is where I come in as a cybersecurity professional. Under corporate social responsibility, I learned that business put their interest and profit ahead of the citizens’ information they are supposed to safeguard. Businesses are always going to act in that manner. My goal when in the field is to design frameworks that help place the consumers’ data in a very safe position and data transmission in a very safe and professional manner, also keeping consumers updated on any issue regarding their information entrusted to us. We read in the course work how Equifax ultimately failed at that.

Whistleblower

There is a stigma towards whistleblowers, and most people think of these as traitors. I learned in this course work that they do this in the very interest of the company, to protect the fundamentals of the company. Edward Snowden did this to save America from itself. This coursework has expanded my perception of whistleblowing from all angles. Instead, I will be a whistleblower for all the right reasons rather than watch a vast investment collapse on my watch.

Information warfare

Information warfare is manipulating information trusted by an audience without the target audience knowing the degree of manipulation. The sole purpose of information warfare is to cause the targeted audience to make a decision that might seem right to them. However, it unknowingly works in the interest of the individual or organization conducting the information alteration or warfare. This is a very critical means of manipulating the thought process of a group of people and it was applied in the 2016 presidential election. It might sound little, but this caused a change to a national democracy. This is something the world should not downplay at all. In as much as information manipulation leads to major scientific breakthroughs, in the hands of the wrong individuals, this can be highly catastrophic.

Professional ethics

This topic laid out all the possibilities of biases in the field and how the algorithms are enhancing that. a good practice is to maintain an open mind in all our approaches to be successful in anything we do. Algorithms can fail and have proven that time and again. We as humans should be the final decision point putting all safeties and considerations in place.

In conclusion, my career will be highly successful based on the safety measures l enforce and how much integrity l bring to work. My relationship with the community will play a critical role, as without them; there is no data to be collected for my decision making.