Three Distinct Perspectives of Applied Ethics in the World of ICT

This paper discusses the impact of WannaCry Ransomware attack on personal information security and the application of professional, philosophical, and sociological perspectives in ICT ethics. It analyzes the ethical issues related to the attack and the need for different perspectives to deal with them. The paper explores the professional ethics perspective, which stresses on the strict regulations and guidelines, the philosophical ethics perspective, which makes philosophical enquiries such as being correct or incorrect according to the applied ethics, and the sociological ethics perspective, which contains the normative ethics, meta-ethics, applied ethics, and descriptive ethics. The paper concludes that different perspectives play a substantial role in influencing unethical activities like the spreading of the WannaCry ransomware within a society or globally.

Running head: TOPICS IN IT ETHICS
Topics in IT ethics
Three Distinct Perspectives of Applied Ethics
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1TOPICS IN IT ETHICS
Introduction
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.
Professional ethics perspective
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

2TOPICS IN IT ETHICS
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.
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

3TOPICS IN IT ETHICS
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.
Philosophical Ethics Perspectives
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

4TOPICS IN IT ETHICS
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).
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.
Sociological Ethics Perspectives
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

5TOPICS IN IT ETHICS
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

6TOPICS IN IT ETHICS
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.

7TOPICS IN IT ETHICS
Reference
Chatterjee, S., Sarker, S., & Valacich, J. S. (2015). The behavioral roots of information systems
security: Exploring key factors related to unethical IT use. Journal of Management
Information Systems, 31(4), 49-87.
Chen, Q., & Bridges, R. A. (2017). Automated Behavioral Analysis of Malware A Case Study of
WannaCry Ransomware. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.08753.
Durkheim, E. (2013). Professional ethics and civic morals. Routledge.
Eden, G., Jirotka, M., & Stahl, B. (2013, May). Responsible research and innovation: Critical
reflection into the potential social consequences of ICT. In Research Challenges in
Information Science (RCIS), 2013 IEEE Seventh International Conference on (pp. 1-12).
IEEE.
Greenwood, M. (2013). Ethical analyses of HRM: A review and research agenda. Journal of
Business Ethics, 114(2), 355-366.
Harriss, D. J., & Atkinson, G. (2013). Ethical standards in sport and exercise science research:
2014 update·. International journal of sports medicine, 34(12), 1025-1028.
Marcial, D. E. (2017). ICT social and ethical competency among teacher educators in the
philippines. Інформаційні технології і засоби навчання, (57, вип. 1), 96-103.
Mattei, T. A. (2017). Privacy, Confidentiality, and Security of Health Care Information: Lessons
from the Recent WannaCry Cyberattack. World neurosurgery, 104, 972-974.

8TOPICS IN IT ETHICS
Slusky, L., & Goodrich, J. A. (2016, June). Human Factors of Cybersecurity Awareness.
In EdMedia: World Conference on Educational Media and Technology (pp. 436-444).
Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).
Stahl, B. C., Eden, G., & Jirotka, M. (2013). Responsible research and innovation in information
and communication technology: Identifying and engaging with the ethical implications of
ICTs. Responsible innovation, 199-218.
Van Staveren, I. (2013). The values of economics: An Aristotelian perspective. Routledge.
Zhou, W., & Piramuthu, S. (2013). Technology regulation policy for business ethics: An
example of RFID in supply chain management. Journal of business ethics, 116(2), 327-
340.