Ethics, as It Pertains to Information Technology Term Paper

Ethics, as It Pertains to Information Technology - Term Paper Example Ethics in information technology is a branch of philosophy that deals with how people should make decisions concerned with their professional conduct, when using information technology. Computers have dramatically changed information handling and communication, but have also caused ethical questions to be raised on standards that the users of information technology should uphold in order to be at par with the expectations from the society. The most theatrical abuse of computer technology is the rampant internet hackings of company websites and online theft of credit card numbers. Such cases are imperceptible, frequent and tied to everyday workings of ordinary, law abiding citizens and different situations are on the rise with great frequency due to computer hacking. Hacking is a situation where an individual referred to as a hacker, gains, or attempts to gain access to resources or services belonging to someone else from their computer databases, usually organizations or companies wi thout their prior authorization or awareness (Davis, Philipp and Cowen, 2005). Such activities lead to the disruption of services, loss of data as well as vandalism of data, software or even hardware resources. Hackers are motivated by a multitude of reasons, which include, getting profits, protests, or to gain recognition based on the enormity of the challenge. Hackers have different attitudes and aims. They use different terms to differentiate themselves from each other, or to exclude themselves from specific groups that they have disagreements with. Members of the computer underground should be referred to as crackers and not hackers. A cracker is someone who gains unauthorized access to a computer in order to commit crimes such as information theft. The amount of data and its confidentiality amplifies the concerns that are raised over information technology ethics, and why they should be maintained. Organizations are then forced to device come up with ethical standards that will guide their employees conduct while at the same time ensuring that they remain within the bounds of acceptable public ethics. However, there has been a disregard of societal ethics where companies have employed espionage tactics over rival companies to gain unfair competitive advantage by hacking into their information systems or purchasing information from hackers. In other cases, inquisitive minors have done hacking using a computer and an internet connection. A good example is that of a juvenile who, in March of 1997, sent a couple of computer commands from his personal computer effectively and disabled a telephone company services that was serving an airport in the United States. Such actions have drawn major attention from security agencies such as the F.B.I, and they have made fighting computer hacking be one of their priorities. In the recent past, there has been an accelerated increase in the number of organized hacker groups all over the world. Such groups gather occasiona lly in conventions such as DEF CON, HoHoCon, and SummerCon and such conventions provide information and a means to learn from other members. Hackers also gain credibility by affiliating themselves to elite hacker organizations. Public interest groups such as the computer Ethics Institute have been in the frontline in trying to lay down the ethical standards that computer users should uphold. Various security agencies have highly prioritized cases of hacking to the extent of setting up a