Nit2201 | It Profession And Assessment Answers

Answer:

Introduction

In March 2018, a ransomware attack carried out by malicious hackers affected the whole city of Atlanta. The hackers kept an eye on various data which affected the whole nation. The city was suffering from the effects of attack even after several months have passed. It ultimately created an issue since data hostage demanded a lump sum amount of money after the attack (Peters, 2015). It ultimately becomes a vital matter for various authorities to pay the ransom value or not.  According to the ICT solution, the given situation can be analyzed for various ethical issues. The analysis will be done with the help of major factors of applied ethics. In the coming pages, some important aspects of the report that is professional ethics, philosophical ethics, and sociological ethics have been discussed in details.

Professional Ethics Perspectives

Corporate development professionals are focused to maintain their professional ethics.  It is generally expected that the person working the corporate platform will follow the same standard throughout their lifetime service (Sorokin, 2017). The professional aspect of personal behavior should be just considered as a part of the project only. This ultimately relates to the fact that professionalism should not perform any kind of activities which will harm the organization, people or their profession.

Various professionals around the globe have to pass through training procedures before getting into professions. This ultimately relates to the fact behavior performance of an individual should be just towards their profession only. That particular individual should be prepared for any step which would benefit his profession. The professional implication can be stated as the protection of an individual. A professional should have a positive attitude towards his profession (Christians et al., 2015).  Activities which can harm the profession of the individual should be banned or abandoned. People who are associated with the respective organization should be barred as per the professional ethics. 

In this case, attackers have gained an accesses to computers which have provided them with activities of the whole city. It has ultimately break various ethical implication imposed by professional ethics. Ransomware transfer is a major kind of ethical implication which should be kept away from developing for malicious attackers that breach out data and are not authorized to use (Bertrand, 2018). Every professional should come up with sole ownership of authorized use and professional ethics so that no one else should be able to use it in a proper way. Every personal data should come up with sole ownership of an authorized user. By professional ethics, no one should have an easy access to them. By this method, a proper balance is maintained between the user and all of the substrate for which data has been working. In this case, all the professional codes of ethics have been violated as a ransomware attack has victimized all the people who are associated with the profession. A hacker is the only guy responsible for a data breach.  Any developer should have a positive intention for creating a software which can be used for providing benefits to the associated organization. Ransomware developer, develop software which can not only harm other but can help in gaining financial ransom in exchange of data provided. It ultimately defines the laws of professional ethics in the much better way (Gupta, Agrawal & Yamaguchi, 2016). Apart from this, various organization or authorities should be careful regarding the fact of handling the enormous value of data. Along with this, they must understand the confidentiality of data. If there is a failure against the protection of data against hacking can be considered as the disobey of professional ethics.

Philosophical Ethics Perspectives

Professional ethics can be easily stated as delicate human professionals which will make the various professionals to easily question their activities. It mainly checks the fact whether it is justified or unjust as per the human morals (Buczak & Guven, 2016).  For proper professional conduct an individual need to be morally correct. While carrying out their task every individual should be true to their moral laws.  A philosophical ethics is not generally limited to professional and professions. It also focuses on the fact that individuals should be true to the profession and their life. Now if a profession of a given person does not allow him to morally justified then the rest of life would be justified as the rest of the life. Then its implication is not justified as per the various professional ethics (Gordon et al., 2015). It also addresses the fact that a person cannot provide justification against morality which is given towards profession life or personal life. He or she cannot overlook their philosophical ethics towards anyone of them.

Now coming to the given scenario of philosophical ethics which took place in the city of Atlanta with respect to ransomware attack. There is mainly perspective in the given scenario. The first one is the perspective of the attackers who caused the attack and another one is the various person who is in charge of protecting confidential and important data of the city. Along with these, they are involved in protecting and controlling the system of the entire city (Kharraz et al., 2015).  Both this two perspective can be controlled by the help of professional ethics.

Ethical choices are considered to be one toughest choice during the entire professional life cycles. Experiences in-person life help in having an idea regarding between right and wrong. The effect or consequence of right and wrong totally depends on the perspective of an individual that is it varies from one person to another. Causing any kind of harm cannot be justified at any point of view. Ransomware attack which can be carried out by various malicious developer needs to be carried in the whole city of Atlanta. It mainly focuses on the bargain of the whole network of the city (Maurya et al., 2018). The hackers have demanded a ransom value of 6,800 USD per system along with a sum value of 51,0000 USD in bitcoins for unlocking each and every system of the city. It is totally unjust as per any kind of philosophical effect which will not harm the city Atlanta for their confidential data which can result in huge economic loss towards Atlanta City.

Sociological/Descriptive Ethics Perspectives

In any phenomenon, there are many cases or aspects of an ethical perspective. These can be easily differentiated into ethics, descriptive ethics, meta-ethics and lastly applied ethics. Normative ethics are mainly applied to a large number of ways which can be used for maintaining ethical implications. On the other hand, meta-ethics mainly describes the actual kind of ethics which are related to ethical implication behind the behavior action of an individual (Quinkert et al., 2018). The idea of descriptive ethics establishes a bridge between the two aspects regarding the behavior of an individual with respect to professional. It is to be noted that the ethics perspective should be taken into consideration which is important for empirical research. It totally depends on the attitude of various people which analyzes ethical implication towards their professions.

In this situation, various malicious developers require software which comes up with the ability to stop any access to the system and make data hostage. The developers mainly targeted the whole city of Atlanta and their devices which gained an access to confidential data of the whole city. It was the sole decision of the group to easily develop and transfer various kinds of a variant of the given software over the given network. It has resulted in various kinds of implications which can bring networks users in this particular city (Mohurle & Patil, 2017). The important work may be hampered just because of this which have continued to work with malicious codes. It mainly focused on the fact how hacker’s morals were affected due to ethical laws which addressed to them have ransom from various authorities.

On another hand, after the attack, Atlanta authorities have agreed to provide their ransom. Apart from this, they asked various municipal authorities to shut down their system. It was done to ensure that the fact virus attack does not bring any of harm to the city. Taking account of the fact that this would be helpful in the propagation of work throughout the city for a given certain amount of time (Chong, 2017). It is the only measures to remove attacks from any kind of hacking of data in the computer. It will ultimately lead to collateral damage which is mainly done for improvement.

References

Bertrand, C. J. (2018). Media ethics and accountability systems. Routledge.

Buczak, A. L., & Guven, E. (2016). A survey of data mining and machine learning methods for cyber security intrusion detection. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 18(2), 1153-1176.

Chong, H. (2017). SeCBD: The Application Idea from Study Evaluation of Ransomware Attack Method in Big Data Architecture. Procedia Computer Science, 116, 358-364.

Christians, C. G., Richardson, K. B., Fackler, M., Kreshel, P., & Woods, R. H. (2015). Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning, CourseSmart eTextbook. Routledge.

Gordon, L. A., Loeb, M. P., Lucyshyn, W., & Zhou, L. (2015). Externalities and the magnitude of cyber security underinvestment by private sector firms: a modification of the Gordon-Loeb model. Journal of Information Security, 6(1), 24.

Gupta, B., Agrawal, D. P., & Yamaguchi, S. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of research on modern cryptographic solutions for computer and cyber security. IGI Global.

Kharraz, A., Robertson, W., Balzarotti, D., Bilge, L., & Kirda, E. (2015, July). Cutting the gordian knot: A look under the hood of ransomware attacks. In International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment (pp. 3-24). Springer, Cham.

Maurya, A. K., Kumar, N., Agrawal, A., & Khan, R. A. (2018). Ransomware: Evolution, Target and Safety Measures.

Mohurle, S., & Patil, M. (2017). A brief study of wannacry threat: Ransomware attack 2017. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science, 8(5).

Peters, R. S. (2015). Ethics and Education (Routledge Revivals). Routledge.

Quinkert, F., Holz, T., Hossain, K. S. M., Ferrara, E., & Lerman, K. (2018). RAPTOR: Ransomware Attack PredicTOR. arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.01598.

Sorokin, P. (2017). Social and cultural dynamics: A study of change in major systems of art, truth, ethics, law and social relationships. Routledge.