Professional ethics perspective
The increasing tendency of latest technological developments in the field of ICT made way for the rise of many types of cybercrimes globally and the chosen topic of this paper is the major WannaCry Ransomware attack which affected more than 230,000 computers system users in its initial phases (Chen & Bridges, 2017). It raised a huge question on the security of personal information and the infected people were very much concerned about the issue and till date, this particular attack has no preventive measures initially if the system is already infected, there are some preventive measures but are not always applicable. This paper revolves around the application of the different types of perspectives such as professional, philosophical and sociological in applied ethics in the world of ICT and its acceptance and impact after being incorporated in any organisation. The ethical issues related to the chosen ethical issue is thoroughly analysed in this paper.
In this section of the paper, the professional perspectives of the applied ethics are discussed and critically analysed. It is defined as the type of viewpoint which accepts values of personal and business behaviour viewpoint and provides the supervisory standards. There are different categories of professional ethics which are recognized by all the international ICT organizations which shows the ways to the employers in accomplishing their organisational goals by maintaining the ethical moralities (Durkheim, 2013). The professional ethical perspectives not only stresses on the strict regulations and guidelines but it also helps in maintaining them thankfully. It is established in such a method so that it meets the requirements of the business organisation. The increasing developments in the ICT industry worldwide exposed a wide range on negativity which has a direct impact on the exposed environments. Those perspectives which are imposed on the employees of an organisation also focusses on the acceptance and the maintenance of those guidelines. The proposed guidelines are always updated according to the requirement as there is always a change of modification of the reason for which the change is need. Initially, it was thought that the disease was spread by a hacking organisation named as the Lazarus group located in North Korea and it is still uncontainable. The attack happened when there was a decline in trend of the other major ethical issues like windows exploits and ransomware.
WannaCry ransomware is a type of worm possessing the ability of lateral movement within an organisation without the intervention of anyone. It was observed that the computer users who are using the Microsoft Windows OS are most vulnerable and prone to that attack. The methodology of the attack is very crucial to understand and implement the professional perspective according to it. The worms encrypt any type of data from a computer system and send a notification to the users demanding ransom payments in bitcoin crypto currency (Marcial, 2017). The entire procedure is completed with the assistance of Eternal Blue which was available in the primitive versions of the Microsoft windows operating system as it was released by an agency named Shadow Breakers.
Philosophical Ethics Perspectives
After the attack was spreading to different parts of the world Microsoft Corporation decided to stop this in an urgent basis so they worked and developed an update in the form of a patch which helped the infected computer systems from spreading the virus as it has the capability of movement within an organisation so any computer infected in an organisation makes the whole organisation vulnerable and thus jeopardising the chances of growth and development (Stahl, Eden, & Jirotka, 2013). The most impacted countries of this attack are the United States of America, United Kingdom and Australia. The WannaCry ransomware developers created the worm only to damage others and extort huge money in exchange for the data under captive. This challenges the laws of professional ethics.
It is one of the most significant perspectives of applied ethics which that makes the philosophical enquiries such as being correct or incorrect according to the applied ethics. In this section of the document, the philosophical ethics of the applied ethics are discussed and analysed. The philosophical ethics of every ICT organisation is working with the technology which aims to deal with systematically working within an environment, protecting and obeying the rules and regulations of the environment and finally acclaiming the concept of being right or wrong in any particular situation and company (Van Staveren, 2013).
With the increasing trend of the advancement of technology in the ICT industry there are many philosophical defects which are needed to be understood and analysed and incorporated into the system in order to maintain the standard of services, maintain the competitiveness among the market rivalries and many other types of issues which might have a direct impact on the development of the organisation. For incorporating those guidelines there is a need for understanding them in the first place and its impact on the environment should also be calculated before applying them.
Every employee working on an organisation have their own ethics which they follow so there should be no pressure on their shoulder that they have to obey the guidelines (Eden, Jirotka & Stahl, 2013). Flexibility should be there in every aspect of implementing the ethically correct perspectives among the employees and it should be followed for a long period of time. The employees should be having common think about the philosophical issues both in their personal and professional life it. The validation of the philosophical perspectives is questionable if it is found that the person is having different perspectives on the same issue in his personal and professional life.
Speaking of the philosophical ethics perspective of the global cyber-attack it can said that the ethical perspectives of both the organization who are developing and spreading the worm along with that the organization who are affected by its impact need to be changed. The main purpose of the organization who are spreading it is extraction of money in a completely wrong and unethical way so it needs to be rechecked as there are several other methods of making big money for business, repetition of such heinous attack may have a direct impact on the economy of the concerned countries as well as the world economy creating more complexities for the nation of the organization who are spreading it (Slusky & Goodrich, 2016).
Sociological Ethics Perspectives
The philosophical ethics perspectives should be changed in the global ICT organizations due to the increasing amount of ethical issues in the recent times. The perspective of the unauthorized cyber criminals in charge of the total process of the hacking issue is responsible for all the data theft the of confidential data of any individual or organization.
In this section of the paper, the sociological perspectives of the applied ethics are discussed and analysed, it is a type of ethics which contains the normative ethics, meta-ethics, applied ethics and descriptive ethics (Greenwood, 2013). The normative ethics refers to the moral ways which every employee of an organization should follow to maintain the moral equilibrium; meta-ethics defines the actual ethical perceptions related to the ethical incidents. The sociological ethics perspectives of applied ethics are helpful in assessing the self?regulatory approaches and is helpful in planning and incorporating the effective decisions. It defines the various types of sociological in a way so that every employee of an organisation gets affected by it (Harriss & Atkinson, 2013).
The management of the organisations develops the various types of sociological perspectives that help them survive in the hostile market conditions. The sociological perspective codes should be prepared in such a way so that it obeys the instructions and principles of the organisation and also values the social aspects of the employees (Zhou & Piramuthu, 2013). The perspectives are incorporated in such a way so that it has a lasting impression on their employees, they should be happily accepting the concepts. Understanding those issues by the employees is one of the primary concern and challenges of the management teams keeping in mind of the impact of those strategies.
In this case, the developers of the WannaCry Ransomware wanted to extort money from the people of the impacted region by barging into any unsecured computer system of any individual or any organization and blackmails them to make payments before retrieving back their data. The areas most affected by the attack are USA, UK and Canada in its initial stages later on it spread throughout the world (Mattei, 2017). The cybercriminals knew about the impact of their worms but still they continued their work without thinking about the sociological perspectives this indicates about the morals of the criminals and puts a question mark on their ethical laws. Initially, their plan worked well but after the development of the patch by Microsoft their plans were rejected and socially rejected (Chatterjee, Sarker & Valacich, 2015). The financial infrastructure of many organizations was severely affected by this attack. The sociological ethics perspectives adopted by the Microsoft corporation was very much needed justifying as morally correct for handing out a huge amount of money in coping up with the issue and was very much appreciated worldwide.
Conclusion
Thus, it can be concluded that WannaCry ransomware worm is a result of the development in ICT industry having a direct negative impact on the society worldwide, and there is a need for applying the three different perspectives so that it can deal with all the moral issues which come their way from different sections of the society. These different perspective helps in playing a very substantial role in influencing unethical activities like the spreading of the WannaCry ransomware within a society or globally.
Reference
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