Students’ perceived ethical severity of e-learning security attacks

Over the past 15 years there has been a sharp increase in the use of e-learning systems both in education for degree delivery as well as corporate environment for training and certification purposes. Information systems security has been an important concern for most organizations. However, very little attention has been given to information security in the context of elearning systems. In this study, we conducted an investigation into students’ perceptions of ethical severity related to five common information security attacks in the context of e-learning. We have concentrated our investigation specifically in testing for differences over these five e-learning security attacks based on gender, age, and academic rank (undergraduate/graduate). Our findings indicate that majority of the students appears to self-report their perceptions as ethically driven across all five e-learning security attacks. However, we were somewhat alarmed to find that, although a small percentage, indeed some students reported these security attacks to be ethical. Our results indicated that overall males find these security attacks less severe than females. We also found that undergraduate students appear to perceive these attacks only slightly less severe than graduate. Age wise, our results indicated that there is an increase trend where the older the student is, the more severe s/he ranks the attacks. The paper concludes with a summary of the results and implication of this study for practice and research.