Building an Active Computer Security Ethics Community

Modern threats such as Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, worms, viruses, phishing, and botnets underscore the need for Internet security research in an increasingly networked and computationally reliant society. Responses to these threats vary from passive observation to calls for the legal right to defend computer systems using aggressive countermeasures. This class of Internet security research is itself at one extreme of a broad spectrum of computer security research that includes embeddable medical devices, automobile and process control systems, electronic voting and payment systems, and personal communication devices.