Ethical Approaches to Cybersecurity

This chapter examines current research on cybersecurity ethics. It frames this around three different approaches to the subject. The first (‘bottom up’) considers ethical issues arising in different case studies and developing groupings of these issues, such as those relating to privacy, those to security, etc. The second approach (‘pragmatist’) considers ethical approaches currently used in cybersecurity practice, focusing on the confidentiality, integrity, availability (CIA) triad. The third approach (‘top down’) takes its starting point as broader ethical theories, which are then applied to cybersecurity. The authors present a novel top-down approach, defining security as the inverse of risk and then drawing on recent literature on the ethics of risk. The chapter concludes with a review of the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.