5 Legal and Ethical Perspectives of Cyberattacks
5 Legal and Ethical Perspectives of Cyberattacks
The proliferation of the internet has enabled hackers to perform cyberattacks and to exploit systems for various reasons. As a result methods and solutions to secure have grown over time to prevent cyberattacks and the metaphorical race is showing no sign of stopping. IBM pointed out that cybersecurity professionals must be as “black hat hackers” as they are ethical, the reason is that their tactics match but instead of exploiting these can be used for safeguarding. The security of system, data and organization are dependent on the professional standards, practices, and principles of employees, i.e., people come up with solutions but people are also responsible for causing problems. There are different ethical issues when it comes to using the internet and being in a cyber domain. There is no argument that cyberattacks are illegal, but most cyberwar attacks do not legally fall into "breaches" or "war crime" categories. Cyberattacks cause destruction to civilian computers as well as damages to reputations so an "ethical attack" is very hard to guarantee in cyberspace. So what legal and ethical implications do cyberattacks have? What are the important ethical and legal issues in cybersecurity?
Misuse to Confidentiality and Privacy
Piracy and Misuse to Property
Resource Allocation for Cyber Security
Transparency and Disclosure
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Cybersecurity Roles, Duties, and Interests
To balance security with other values, like to prevent data leakage, security experts have to evade the privacy of employees.
To create a foolproof incident response plan to handle and mitigate if an incident occurs.
Create a plan for timely identifying vulnerabilities and reporting to employees, clients, and other stakeholders.
To monitor the network without intruding on users and their privacy.
To ensure confidentiality and integrity of data while storing on systems, on clouds, or by sharing it with third parties.
To define roles properly for accountability.
Virtue Ethics: This framework does not search rules for right or wrong but focuses on the quality of the person. These are also termed as character biased as it tells us about the person’s virtuous character and how one did develop his character.
Consequentialist/Utilitarian Ethics: Consequentialist theories are the theories of ethics that describe principles to guide the moral action through the expected results of those actions. A common form of this theory is utilitarian ethics which tells the moral laws in any situation.
Deontological Ethics: These are based on the rule of ethics in which there are one or multiple rules or obligations declared to identify the responsibility or moral code of life.
Making or usage of the system by keeping in view the human’s interest by checking whether the system running is in favor of human lives or not.
Designing technically as well as socially for encouraging the security and privacy aim in the organization.
Implementing protocols and protective measures such as email and domain security best practices. Monitoring DMARC and DKIM correct implementations and SPF record check to prevent human error and attacks as much as possible.
Encourage me to take input from the different stakeholders as this will overcome groupthink in the ethical risk assessment.
About Araz Guidanian
Araz Guidanian is part of the content team at EasyDMARC. She writes articles about cybersecurity and protection.