Social, Ethical, and Professional Issues Blogs

IT 109 Series of Blogs

[majestickaang]

Position

A computer science student in a developing country.

What is your position on “software piracy”? Provide at least three major arguments, backing them up with ethical theories, the law, codes of conduct, any other appropriate principles.

First, let us define what software piracy is. Software piracy is defined as the stealing of legally protected software. Software piracy occurs, under the copyright law, when copyright protected software is copied, distributed, modified, or sold.

There are many types of software piracy and one of it is softlifting. Somehow, we students are guilty of this type of piracy since we do borrow and install a copy of a software application from our classmates.

[majestickaang]

Computer Security Consultant

An online company who accepts credit card details wants to secure its customers’ details, and safeguard against damage.

Fraud and Identity Theft are likely crimes to be committed in this case. This makes computer as target and computer as tool. Two-factor authentication for VPN access as an optimal security measure to protect against online fraud and unauthorized access for clients that connect to their networks from a remote location

A communications company employing a lot of young, technically able people, wants to ensure its online facilities are not being abused.

Phreaking is likely the crime to be committed in this case. Telephone company employees were some of the threat where computer and network security, wiretapping, and privacy may be in danger. It may also mean that somebody who like to “break into” or abuse the telephone network of makes phone calls without paying. Network security involve the authentication of access to data in a network, which is controlled by the network administrator. This security measure consists of the policies and practices adopted to prevent and monitor unauthorized access, misuse, modification, or denial of a computer network and network-accessible resources.

A high-security establishment needs to ensure that only authorized users can access certain parts of the system.

Hacking is likely the crime to be committed in this case. Threats come form intentional acts which includes hacking and shared user accounts and unintentional acts which includes unprotected passwords. Access control policies and access enforcement mechanisms are employed to the establishment to control access between users and objects in the information system. In addition to enforcing authorized access at the information-system level, access enforcement mechanisms are employed at the application level, to provide increased information security for the establishment when necessary.

A private consultant has a contract with a research organization working on highly sensitive issues. He needs to be sure his communications are secure, and some of the documents he sends might be used as legal proof of his recommendations.

Hacking is likely the crime to be committed in this case. One of its threat is the lack of proper encryption. Data encryption would be appropriate since it encodes data upon transmission or storage so that only authorized individuals can read it. As we all know, encryption is now with different rage of settings that includes different organizations such as enterprises, armed forces, e-commerce websites and many more.

[majestickaang]

Security Technologies

Biometrics is defined as the measurement and statistical analysis of people’s unique physical and behavioral characteristics. The problems of implementing this technology is that, it is now still limited to certain physical attributes and need more authentication in the behavioral aspect. Biometric factors have not been adopted widely so far because there is less confidence in the uniqueness which includes the retina, iris, voice and facial scans and many more. On the other hand, the greatest strength of biometrics is that, it provides the distinctive information for every individual and can be utilized as a technique for individual identification. However, this technology is also prone to attackers. With the help of high-quality cameras and other sensors, attackers may collect biometric data from individuals without their consent.

Encryption is defined as the method by which plaintext or any type of data is converted from readable to form to an encoded version that can only be decoded by another entity if they have access to a decryption key. Generally, data is most vulnerable when it is being moved from one location to another. Though encryption does not protect against all cyber-attacks, but through this technology, it makes data theft a much more difficult task for hackers. It protects the confidentiality of digital data stored on computer systems or transmitted via the internet or other computer network. On the other hand, attackers may attempt to break a targeted cipher through cryptanalysis. It is the process of attempting to find a weakness in the cipher that can be exploited with a complexity less than a brute-force attack.

Access control is defined as a security technique that regulates who or what can view or use resources in a computing environment. It is a fundamental concept in security that minimizes risk to the business organization. A common security issue is failure to revoke credentials and access to systems and data when individual moves into a different job internally or leaves the company. It perform identification authentication and authorization of users and entities by evaluating required login credentials that can include passwords, PINS, biometric scans, and other authentication factors. On the other hand, access control can be hacked. The people’s information can be accessed when the system is hacked depending on what and where the information is stored. There are also cases where the access control systems, despite increasing in security, can be tampered with and broken into.

Firewalls is defined as a software or firmware that enforces a set of rules about what data packets will be allowed to enter or leave a network. Through the use of firewall, it can prevent attacks on your private network by the other networks outside the world which keeps you aside from the non-authorized users. However, packet filtering by a software firewall can degrade your system’s performance because it’s a demanding task to examine every packet of data.

[majestickaang]

The Mafiaboy Hacking Case

The case was about a former teen hacker Mafiaboy, aka Michael Calce, which was hunted by the FBI. The world’s most famous teen hacker Mafiaboy says we’re making it even easier now for the new generation of cyber crooks. He is also one of the most wanted cyber criminals in the world.

He is one of the world’s best-known hackers –the 15 years old kid who shut down the internet. Calce gave himself the nickname when he used his computer to shut down the websites of the websites of some of the world’s biggest companies, including CNN, Dell, Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay.

The protagonist involved is Michael Cacle, the Mafiaboy. The parties involved are some of the world’s biggest companies, which includes the CNN, Dell, Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay.

Mr Calce was arrested by the FBI and pleaded guilty to the hacking.

He was charged with more than 50 crimes and sentenced to eight months in a youth detention centre.

The ethical uses raised by this case are self-awareness, conflict of interest, and data collection and privacy.

Source:

https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/former-teen-hacker-mafiaboy-was-hunted-by-the-fbi-but-now-fights-cyber-crime/news-story/7f322b8403d023d5c7de662fd14072fb

[majestickaang]

Importance in Following Computer Ethics

This weblog is created for the compliance of academic requirements on IT 109 - Social, Ethical and Professional Issues, MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology.

According to the dictionary, the word ethics is defined as the moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity. It simply means that ethics is concerned with what is morally good and bad, right and wrong, and what to do and what not to do. However, the question here is “are we practicing it everywhere, even in the computer field”?

When we talk about computer ethics, what comes to our mind first? Is it the unauthorized access of our computers or perhaps hacking some WiFi password? You may even include watching pornography, receiving spam emails, or software piracy where we are somehow guilty of, I guess. So, what is computer ethics? Computer ethics, also known as information technology ethics, deal with the moral and ethical use of computer applications, software, and data storage devices.

Software piracy, unauthorized access, pornography, spamming, and hacking are some of the examples of cyber crime issues. Privacy, for example, is one of the major issues that has emerged where Internet users hand over personal information in order to sign up or register for services without even realizing that they are setting themselves for privacy invasions. This is the main reason why computer ethics are becoming more important because the widespread popularity and use of the Internet has given rise to a number of cyber crime issues and concerns about user privacy.

We maybe now ignorant what computer ethics is, but it should not be a reason to learn the importance of computer ethics. With the usage of technology for means of communication being more preferred, following computer ethics have become a must not just only for people who works in the IT industry, but to every individual. We should stop our bad habit of taking less serious of the virtual world compare to the real world and let us use technology wisely.