Information Technology Essay

A number of professions in our society ar needful to abide by a certain set of rules that regulate their actions receivable to the nature of work they are engaged in. Examples are those of lawyers, doctors, accountants, who follow codes of morality that define acceptable and punishable behavior to patients and clients. Now, as we are moving towards the culture age, more and more organizations are evolving to system automation as they abandon old manual methods of data storage and maintenance.The field of reading Technology has really changed the way people work. As guilds valuable information and data are stored, IT surety professionals, just ilk doctors and lawyers are tasked with important functions, they hold responsibilities that are concerned with the protection of data and systems from unauthorized external and internal access, prevention of disruption especially from software program and hardware attacks, modification and destruction of meshworks. By handling thes e delicate information they posses a great deal of power that whitethorn be abused.The setoff final result that highlights the need for a code of ethics for IT professionals is that of privacy, one of the hottest topics in information hostage. These professionals are able to access crucial information which may be about customers, industries, government agencies, skunks, people and networks, that if used wrongly impart result to serious legal implications. An utilization of which is an IT security mortalnel, in counseling of regulating website access of employees of a company.During the course of blocking off sites and programme firewalls, they tolerate install key loggers that enables them to view whatever a person types on a keyboard, these may include credit card numbers, personalized information, nones and emails. Release of much(prenominal) vital information can provide the infallible tools for identity theft, fraud, misrepresentation, blackmail and commission of many more crimes. Another issue linked to privacy of information, is confidentiality.Company information such as bare-ass products, financial reports, projected plans and researches can be sold off to competitors, this can lead to serious business damage such as loser of a business. Third, is the monetary benefit that may be derived from the manipulation of a system. Aside from actual theft of information, IT security professionals can alter programmed security measures and charge additional fees for something that they themselves maneuvered.They can make a system seem to be vulnerable to threats created by them. (Whitman and Mottard, 2007, p. 0-99) Moving forward, a number of companies are able to recognize the need to abide by ethical practices. An example of an ethical security practice is that of Cisco Systems Inc. , a multinational IT corporation that designs and sells network communication technology and services. They once encountered a vulnerability that the company felt would affect the health of the Internet, so the company contacted backbone providers initial to check over their systems were patched to protect them from the threat. (Davidson, 2008, Leading By Example).The company has since indeed receive various awards for Ethical practices. Another example is the development of a software that would at least prevent and regulate unethical security attacks, such as identity theft. This was the creation of Secure Electronic Transfers (SET) which was as developed by SETco, led by VISA and MasterCard (and involving other companies such as GTE, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, RSA and VeriSign). A set of security protocols that ensures the safety of information from the purchaser to the internet, that also takes into consideration safety of consumers.In conclusion, an organization entrusts valuable assets of network and data security to Information Security Professionals. However, unlike older professions such as medicine and law, most ethical issues r egarding this occupation have not been codified to a specific law, and there is still no authorisation association such as (Bar association, American Board for Medicine) that has established a detailed code of ethics that is uniform across all IT professionals. So organizations must take it upon themselves to instill a code of ethics to ensure that these personnel understand the moral and legal implications of their actions.