Critical Thinking Conflict of Interest

Critical Thinking Conflict of Interest

Thomas Lee

University of Maryland University College

May 22, 2018

Critical Thinking Conflict of Interest

The critical thinking paper will be discussing the ethics of representing two hacking groups in different lawsuits that may be called a conflict of interest. There is lawsuit against Anomalous group for hacking the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and CyberTech is serving as the cyber forensics consultants for the Office of Personnel Management. There is also a lawsuit against Equation set for hacking into Anomalous facilities and CyberTech is working for Anomalous as well in that lawsuit. There is a possible conflict of interest for CyberTech in working on a case for and another case against Anomalous. This paper will examine the possible conflict of interest, if CyberTech should drop one of the case, and alternative viewpoints on this case. There will also be explanation of the OPM hack and how it affects the U.S. government since that is based and articles on it can be procured. However, information regarding Equation set hacking Anomalous cannot be found online thus there will be less written about that and some assumptions will have to be made.

OPM hold the personal data of federal employees who have attempted to gain security clearances. This information is extremely valuable for any foreign government intelligence agency. The OPM hack initially thought three point two million federal employee’s information was accessed (Gallagher). However new estimates place that number at 14 million federal employee’s information had been lost to hackers(Gallagher). Investigators place the start of the attack on December of 2014 (Koerner). When KeyPoint Government Solutions had been breached and from this breach credentials to establish a beachhead in OPM was created. From there it was easy for hackers to traverse the network and steal crucial data due to the poor security in place. Then the data was exfiltrated in compressed zip and rar files at a time to avoid detection by security staff (Koerner). Afterwards the poor security was reveled to the United States congress during hearings on the OPM hack. The suspect behind this hack is Anomalous.

The conflicting case is a suit against Equation set a U.S. based hacking group. Anomalous accuses Equation set of hacking their facilities. However, there was very little data that could be found on this hacking attempt. The only facts that can be for sure used for this paper is that Anomalous has a suit against Equation set for hacking their facilities. Also, that CyberTech is working for Anomalous in some capacity.

CyberTech must represent all its clients unbiasedly and to the best of their abilities (Anderson). CyberTech cannot call itself an ethical company if they fail to do this. There is a conflict of interest for CyberTech because of the OPM case and the accusations against Equation Set (Anderson). This makes it very difficult for CyberTech to represent OPM against Anomalous and represent Anomalous in their suit against Equation set. This is because while serving Anomalous in some capacity it would be sensible to not work as hard or even sabotage the forensics work being conducted for OPM and vice versa. This makes difficult for CyberTech to be unbiased while working for both groups. If CyberTech continues to work for OPM and Anomalous, then to third parties CyberTech is not addressing conflicts of interests. It may be possible but extremely difficult for CyberTech to represent Anomalous and OPM. Most if not all third party viewers would not believe CyberTech was impartial. This would damage CyberTech reputation with future and other current clients.  Either OPM or Anomalous must be dropped as clients to ensure neutrality and ethics.