Memo on Ethics
Ethical issues such as denial of service attacks often arouse numerous reactions with different individuals in the society offering their views regarding its existence. The concern for denial of service attacks emanates from the overall effect it causes on an organization’s role and performance. A notable case of ethics that hit headlines was the denial of service attacks against companies that did not support piracy and failed to support wiki leaks. The operation is infamously known by the name operation payback. This memo will seek to elaborate on the so-called operation payback by noting some of the issues that led to its existence. The memo will also note some of the ethical concerns that were raised by this event with some of the counter arguments that are presented for its existence.
According to Josh and Charles (7), operation payback began as a coordinated attack that was targeting high profile companies that were against internet piracy. A notable back-story claims that Aiplex an Indian software company hired by motion pictures of America created DDoS attacks on BitTorrent sites such as Pirate Bay with the aim of culling any form of piracy on Motion Pictures. The main intention was to cause service interruptions to all individuals that shared files. One of the groups known by the name Anonymous was against this move, and it developed its own collective retaliation attacks dubbing it the name Operation Payback. Aiplex was affected by this move, and they were literary brought to a standstill. One of the images used by the Anonymous group is as shown below:
The effectiveness of this attack encouraged the hackers to proceed with their attacks to not only other organizations in the world, but it affected some governments such as in the case of Zimbabwe. Their intention was meant only to prevent privacy, but their move snowballed to releasing privacy of other company’s data. Another notable case was an attack on all those companies that withdrew their financing facilities from wiki leaks. Anonymous though they did this since wiki leaks played a major role in whistle blowing not only for government organizations and institutions, but also to other organizations and their wrong doings.
Several ethical issues with counter arguments against this move arose and they are as noted below
Arguments For Operation Payback |
Counter Thoughts |
- The group was concerned with allowing individuals all around the world to have access to piracy
- And allow other people to have access to any form of information for free
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Piracy is one ethical issue that affects survival of organizations, and forcing them to oblige to from making such fights raises concern on why they should exist in the first place.
Allowing free access to piracy only served to show the little concern that this group had for individuals that strove to showcase the films or the music (Claudine 3)
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- Hacking on to banks that did not finance Julian Assange move to expose evils all around the world showed their concern to enable Julian to expose some of the evils that occur in governments.
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Banks withdrew out of choice and hacking into them would not serve to force them to finance Julian’s Operations as they did this out of choice (Claudine 5) |
Whatever the side of the coin you choose, it is the ethics that you have learned that you are urged to apply, it is the same ethics that will guide you to what is right.
Works Cited
Claudine, Beaumont. WikiLeaks: What is a distributed denial of service attack? The Telegraph. 2010. Web. 09 Dec 2010.
Josh, Halliday. And Charles, Arthur. WikiLeaks: Who are the hackers behind Operation Payback? The Guardian. 2010. Web. 8 December 2010.