Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The dual-use nature of AI, serving both legitimate and malicious purposes, poses a significant challenge for ethical hackers. They must navigate a complex ethical landscape, balancing the need to counter rapidly evolving AI-driven threats with the responsibility to uphold professional ethics, often blurring the line between ethical and unethical practices. The study explores how AI shapes ethical hacking practices. Using a qualitative approach, we analyzed interview and digital trace data to uncover five key practices where tensions emerge: augmenting hacking capabilities, interrogating AI, managing risk, bypassing ethical restrictions, and adapting AI for emerging threats. These tensions reflect trade-offs between ethical principles such as autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, explicability, and justice. The findings contribute to the cybersecurity literature on ethical hacking.
Authors: Goerdat, Shalita, Schirrmacher, Nina
Institutions: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The University of Sydney
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: European Commission
OpenAlex ID: W7019283169
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