Key Skills for a Cyber Career - Integrity

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In the previous article I have shared some thoughts about ethics, living a good life and becoming a better person by following your moral compass. And yes, integrity is connected to ethics but there are slight differences.

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“Integrity is the practice of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or earnestness of one’s actions” (Wikipedia).

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Integrity is a quality of a person’s character, it refers to wholeness and purity, on the relationship between a person’s intentions and corresponding actions, and a person’s identity. It is mostly seen as the clash between our desires and our commitments, will and weaknesses, our knowledge and ignorance.

Susan E. Babbitt said about personal integrity:

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“…recognize that some social structures are of the wrong sort altogether for some individuals to be able to pursue personal integrity, and that questions about the moral nature of society often need to be asked first before questions about personal integrity can properly be raised. Questions about integrity may turn out to be, not about the relationship between individual characteristics, interests, choices and so on, and a society, but rather about what kind of society it is in terms of which an individual comes to possess certain interests, characteristics, and so on. This does not imply that questions about personal integrity are entirely moral, not having to do with idiosyncratic characteristics of individuals; instead, it suggests that the very meaning of personal integrity in particular cases sometimes depends upon more general considerations about the nature of the society that makes some idiosyncratic properties identifying and others not. The pursuit of adequate personal integrity often depends, not so much on understanding who one is and what one believes and is committed to, but rather understanding what one’s society is and imagining what it could be.”

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While ethics could be mostly a work requirement and something we adhere to, integrity is a personal affair and could be described with the following characteristics:

?Accountability: you take responsibility for your actions; you own your mistakes and learn from them. Being accountable / owning it will help you develop both personally and professionally.

?Respect: this is beyond your typical DEI, Introduction to Bias, or any ethics code. Is about valuing our differences, perspectives and thoughts. This is beyond your typical labels and understanding that everyone is unique, with good and bad days, with different views than our own, and at different stages in life and career.

?Trustworthiness: Trust is the foundation for any personal and professional relationship. If you are not consistent or credible and acting unethically when you must honor your commitments than you are not trustworthy. Small actions would make a big difference, if you promised you will deliver something by Friday and you didn’t, maybe it’s not a big deal you might think but let me share something that I learned back when I was a SecOps engineer. One of my colleagues consistently was late to the team meetings, it was always a couple of minutes and at first didn’t seem a big deal but at some point, my manager said to him: “If I cannot trust you that you will be on time when the meeting starts, how can I trust you that you will deliver when we need it the most”. I didn’t fully understand the power of the message back then but with time things change, and he was right, most of the time we couldn’t rely on our colleague to deliver or help in time, it was just a new excuse all the time. With time I also learned that it gets worse when that colleague is your manager and catastrophic if he is the one preaching about how to build trust.

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The best part about integrity is that over time you build self-respect, you will know your worth, your values and standards, but you need to be patient, good things require time.

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To touch the philosophical side of the subject. You are a cybersecurity professional, and you see that your manager is consistently reporting “just half of the truth” to the board or maybe fake data just to show that the information security program is making progress, and the company is in good hands with him. What do you do? Are you willing to confront him? Probably he is not going to listen and even worse, retaliate. Are you ready to become the whistleblower and report your manager to the board? There are no good or bad answers, just answers. The main point is to own whatever decision you will make as otherwise those might haunt you for a while or for life. That will be a moment in time when you need to think strategically, balance your options and think of the personal and professional outcomes of your decision.

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Touching the cybersecurity aspect of integrity, it’s one of the three pillars of security along with Confidentiality and Availability (CIA Triad). Ensuring that data remains intact, unmodified when stored, moved or processed is critical to prevent unauthorized or malicious changes that could compromise the authenticity of the information. This would be the human equivalent of, lie, deceive, or harm others.

Integrity is a crucial component of cybersecurity that guarantees the dependability and credibility of data. It is essential to preserving system confidence, safeguarding sensitive data, as well as adhering to legal obligations. To protect the integrity of their data and systems, organizations need to put in place safeguards like encryption, access controls, and integrity checks. There are plenty of resources online that talk about the CIA triad so I will not go deeper on the topic, but if need help just let me know I will do my best to point you to some free resources.

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Like organizations, to protect our integrity we need to put in place safeguards, follow our values and principles, build and implement high standards, reflect and seek to understand if our integrity checks are in place and working (see if we are compliant to our own controls, just like we do daily in cyber).

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As a closing line, the only thing I want you to do is just to think about it, make sure you are aligned with yourself, and your actions speak about your core self.