Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Ethical Blog Post Assignment

Situation: A British student who breached security at Facebook in 2011 has been sentenced to eight months in jail.

Claim: Glenn Mangham, who had previously been rewarded by Yahoo for finding vulnerabilities in its systems, unlawfully accessed and hacked into Facebook’s computer systems between April and May last year from his bedroom in York. Specifically, Mangham breached a webserver used by Facebook to set puzzles to software engineers who might be interested in working for the social network. Mangham then gained access to the account of Facebook employee Stefan Parker, and used the staff member’s privileges to access Facebook’s Mailman server, and the Facebook Phabricator server used by internal developers, But his intentions were not malicious.

Agrument: Prosecutors claimed that Facebook spent US $200,000 dealing with the aftermath of Mangham’s hack, which prompted a “concerted, time-consuming and costly investigation” by the FBI and British law enforcement. According to me he was an “ethical” or “white-hat” hacker, whose intentions – rather than being malicious – were to uncover security vulnerabilities at Facebook with the intention of getting them fixed.

Principles: He insured that he utilized his skills for betterment of the software, hardware and the computing platform as a whole. Satisfaction of doing something good is one of the main ethics.

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