Assessing ethical severity of e-learning systems security attacks

Security and ethical issues with information systems (IS) are important concerns for most organizations. However, limited attention has been given to unethical behaviors and severity of cyber-security attacks, while these instances appear to be critically important. Although managers have been embracing e-learning systems for training and virtual-team collaborations, little is known about motivations for cyber-security attacks on such systems. Our research includes quantitative and qualitative study of 519 end-users who rated the ethical severity of five common cybersecurity attacks. This study investigated five types of security attacks for differences in perceived severity according to gender, academic level, and age. Our findings reveal that the majority of users (90%) reported their sense of severity as unethical across all five cyber-security attacks, while only a small minority of users (3.24%) reported these cyber-security attacks to be ethical. This study also presents a further grounded analysis through follow-up interviews.