How can we be honest to the people and companies we work with while still staying loyal to ourselves and our beliefs? Is it ever right to lie or keep secrets? This article explores these questions.
Imagine you are an IT expert who has been called in to assess the security of a company’s systems. During your assessment, you discover that the company is not following best practices – in fact, they are doing quite a few things wrong. Do you report this to the company? Or do you keep quiet and hope that no one will find out? Some people would choose to stay silent. But is this really the right thing to do? Or is it just putting companies at risk?
The right thing to do would be to report the company’s security vulnerabilities to them. By keeping quiet, you are essentially putting the company at risk since they are unaware of the dangers that their systems face. It’s important to remember that as an IT expert, you have a responsibility to help protect companies from these types of risks.
What if they are aware of the issues and don’t care? Do you report them to a higher authority? Do you pretend to see nothing? In this type of scenario, it is difficult to know what the right thing to do is. However, you could argue that it is still your responsibility to report the company’s vulnerabilities to a higher authority, in order to protect other companies and individuals who may be affected by them.
Ultimately, it is up to you to decide what the right course of action. You may report them and no actions are taken from the ‘higher authority’. The key is that you reported it and did your duty.
Fortunately, I have not been in this situation. I would like to think that I would report the company’s vulnerabilities to them, but it is difficult to say for sure until you are actually in that situation.
What do you think? Would you report the company’s vulnerabilities to them? Or would you keep quiet and hope that no one will find out? Let me know in the comments below.