Ethical Implications of the Techno-Social Dilemma in Contemporary Cyber-Security Phenomenon in Africa

Author(s):  
Essien D. Essien

This article examines the cyber security dimension of the global information Infrastructure which has resulted in the attainment of remarkable milestones and unlimited opportunities. However, these benefits notwithstanding, the cyberspace is increasingly under attack by cybercriminals, and the cost and damages from such attacks are increasing alarming. This article therefore, sets out to examine the ethical implications of cybersecurity phenomenon. Relying upon an extensive contemporary literature on cyber security, this study examines the phenomenon using the protection motivation theory. The article employs qualitative analysis of the current cybersecurity landscape in Nigeria. With an insight provided into understanding the independent layers of cyber security in Nigeria, a criterion on what should constitute appropriate procedure for cyber security is thus supplied. Findings posit that with the vulnerability of cyberspace, cyber security phenomenon in Africa, mirrors the existing social inequalities and widens the social division that is more apparent with the expansion of the ICTs.

2019 ◽  
pp. 1200-1213
Author(s):  
Essien Essien

This article examines the cyber security dimension of the global information Infrastructure which has resulted in the attainment of remarkable milestones and unlimited opportunities. However, these benefits notwithstanding, the cyberspace is increasingly under attack by cybercriminals, and the cost and damages from such attacks are increasing alarming. This article therefore, sets out to examine the ethical implications of cybersecurity phenomenon. Relying upon an extensive contemporary literature on cyber security, this study examines the phenomenon using the protection motivation theory. The article employs qualitative analysis of the current cybersecurity landscape in Nigeria. With an insight provided into understanding the independent layers of cyber security in Nigeria, a criterion on what should constitute appropriate procedure for cyber security is thus supplied. Findings posit that with the vulnerability of cyberspace, cyber security phenomenon in Africa, mirrors the existing social inequalities and widens the social division that is more apparent with the expansion of the ICTs.


Author(s):  
Essien D. Essien

Discourses on the threats to cyber security in today's digital society have revealed that cyberspace has become an arena of complex national security concern. This lends credence to the fact that many countries, especially in Africa, need to urgently scale up their efforts to effectively secure the Internet and ICT infrastructures. Drawing upon extensive literature on cyber-security challenges, this chapter examines the phenomenon of cybercrime using Ronald Rogers' “protection motivation theory”. The study employs qualitative analysis of the current cyber-security landscape in Africa. Findings posit that with the risk and vulnerability of the cyberspace, cyber security in Africa poses a number of unique challenges which predicate a coordinated response for security and safety engagement. The study suggests collaborative measures to counter cybercrime through investigation, prosecution, and sharing information.


1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-317
Author(s):  
Ziaul Haque

Deveiopment planning in India, as in other developing countries, has generally been aimed at fostering an industrially-oriented policy as the engine of economic growth. This one-sided economic development, which results in capital formation, creation of urban elites, and underprivileged social classes of a modern society, has led to distortions in the social structure as a whole. On the contrary, as a result of this uneven economic development, which is narrowly measured in terms of economic growth and capital formation, the fruits of development have gone to the people according to their economic power and position in the social structure: those occupying higher positions benefiting much more than those occupying the lower ones. Thus, development planning has tended to increase inequalities and has sharpened divisive tendencies. Victor S. D'Souza, an eminent Indian sociologist, utilizing the Indian census data of 1961, 1971, and 1981, examines the problem of structural inequality with particular reference to the Indian Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes - the two most underprivileged sections of the present Indian society which, according to the census of 1981, comprised 15.75 percent and 7.76 percent of India's population respectively. Theoretically, he takes the concept of development in a broad sense as related to the self-fulfIlment of the individual. The transformation of the unjust social structure, the levelling down of glaring economic and social inequalities, and the concern for the development of the underprivileged are for the author the basic elements of a planned development. This is the theoretical perspective of the first chapter, "Development Planning and Social Transformation".


Author(s):  
Steve Bruce

It is right that social researchers consider the ethical implications of their work, but discussion of research ethics has been distorted by the primacy of the ‘informed consent’ model for policing medical interventions. It is remarkably rare for the data collection phase of social research to be in any sense harmful, and in most cases seeking consent from, say, members of a church congregation would disrupt the naturally occurring phenomena we wish to study. More relevant is the way we report our research. It is in the disparity between how people would like to see themselves described and explained and how the social researcher describes and explains them that we find the greatest potential for ill-feeling, and even here it is slight.


Author(s):  
Jason Millar

This chapter argues that, just as technological artefacts can break as a result of mechanical, electrical, or other physical defects not fully accounted for in their design, they can also break as a result of social defects not fully accounted for in their design. These failures resulting from social defects can be called social failures. The chapter then proposes a definition of social failure as well as a taxonomy of social failure modes—the underlying causes that lead to social failures. An explicit and detailed understanding of social failure modes, if properly applied in engineering design practice, could result in a fuller evaluation of the social and ethical implications of technology, either during the upstream design and engineering phases of a product, or after its release. Ideally, studying social failure modes will improve people’s ability to anticipate and reduce the rate or severity of undesirable social failures prior to releasing technology into the wild.


1983 ◽  
Vol 31 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 60-76
Author(s):  
Patricia A. Morgan

Patricia Morgan's paper describes what happens when the state intervenes in the social problem of wife-battering. Her analysis refers to the United States, but there are clear implications for other countries, including Britain. The author argues that the state, through its social problem apparatus, manages the image of the problem by a process of bureaucratization, professionalization and individualization. This serves to narrow the definition of the problem, and to depoliticize it by removing it from its class context and viewing it in terms of individual pathology rather than structure. Thus refuges were initially run by small feminist collectives which had a dual objective of providing a service and promoting among the women an understanding of their structural position in society. The need for funds forced the groups to turn to the state for financial aid. This was given, but at the cost to the refuges of losing their political aims. Many refuges became larger, much more service-orientated and more diversified in providing therapy for the batterers and dealing with other problems such as alcoholism and drug abuse. This transformed not only the refuges but also the image of the problem of wife-battering.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (16) ◽  
pp. 5300
Author(s):  
Antonia Nisioti ◽  
George Loukas ◽  
Stefan Rass ◽  
Emmanouil Panaousis

The use of anti-forensic techniques is a very common practice that stealthy adversaries may deploy to minimise their traces and make the investigation of an incident harder by evading detection and attribution. In this paper, we study the interaction between a cyber forensic Investigator and a strategic Attacker using a game-theoretic framework. This is based on a Bayesian game of incomplete information played on a multi-host cyber forensics investigation graph of actions traversed by both players. The edges of the graph represent players’ actions across different hosts in a network. In alignment with the concept of Bayesian games, we define two Attacker types to represent their ability of deploying anti-forensic techniques to conceal their activities. In this way, our model allows the Investigator to identify the optimal investigating policy taking into consideration the cost and impact of the available actions, while coping with the uncertainty of the Attacker’s type and strategic decisions. To evaluate our model, we construct a realistic case study based on threat reports and data extracted from the MITRE ATT&CK STIX repository, Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), and interviews with cyber-security practitioners. We use the case study to compare the performance of the proposed method against two other investigative methods and three different types of Attackers.


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