An online Banking System that has worked successfully for XYZ Bank for the past fiveyears without any updates suddenly attracted the attention of every news outlets. Morethan half of the bank’s customer accounts have been hacked, causing the loss of billionsof Ghana cedis. The whole incident lasted for a period of 10 months and it took customeragitations before the bank realized what was going on. Investigation reports indicate thata hacker broke into the system using a scheduling function in the source code. Thescheduling function was meant to enhance the processing speeding of the online system.However the regulator detected a minor security weakness in the scheduling functionduring the system testing and validation. The software company was asked to fix theweakness in the scheduling function and a number of other serious functional issues. Allthe serious issues were fixed except the minor weakness in the scheduling function. Thiswas because the programmer who developed that section of the source code was on sickleave. The regulator went on to approve the deployment of the system since theremaining issue was minor and it will require insider knowledge to compromise thesystem. The regulator nonetheless advised the software company to follow up and resolveit.
(a) Give five ethical questions in the above scenario?
(b) Establish the facts of the scenario, at least five?
(c) Who should bare the liability, the Bank, the software company or the regulator, discuss?
(d) Mention five things missing the scenario that would have changed your decision regarding the burden of liability in question (c) above?
What is whistle-blowing, discuss the pros and cons?
