Short Paper: Debating Ethics with Cybersecurity Students

Abstract

We aim to debate and eventually be able to carefully judge how realistic the following statement of a young computer scientist is: “I would like to become an ethical correctly acting offensive cybersecurity expert”. The objective of this article is not to judge what is good and what is wrong behavior nor to present an overall solution to ethical dilemmas. Instead, the goal is to become aware of the various personal moral dilemmas a security expert may face during his work life. For this, a total of 14 cybersecurity students from HS Offenburg were asked to evaluate several case studies according to different ethical frameworks. The results and particularities are discussed, considering different ethical frameworks. We emphasize, that different ethical frameworks can lead to different preferred actions and that the moral understanding of the frameworks may differ even from student to student.