Leonard Janke and Petra Drotleff: On Moral and Cybersecurity

A presentation of Leonard Janke and Petra Drotleff from the CSSO Startup about Moral in Cybersecurity at a High School in Bistrita (Romania).

2. The following slides introduce a talk that Petra Drotleff and Leonard Janke were giving
in two classes of Florin Ioan Bojorat the Tudor Jarda Music High School in Bistrita
(Northern Transylvania, Romania). Particularly, they gave an introduction into the
unconventional topic of “Moral and Cybersecurity”.
Links to:
●Florins blog post
https://florinioanbojor.wordpress.com/2024/10/12/despre-securitate-cibernetica-si-
legile-morale-cu-invitati-din-germania-la-liceul-de-muzica-din-bistrita/
Named first to give props to our ourhosts, for readers of the Romanian language and
to shine a light on how the Romanian side perceived our presentation
●My own related blog post:
https://petradrotleff.blogspot.com/2024/10/combining-humanities-and-tech.html

3. German-African StartUpwithfollowingteammembersas
ofrightnow.
Petra Drotleff: TransylvanianSaxon fromHosmanbornin
Sibiu. Raisedin Uttenweiler (Germany). Professional
background: BA in European Ethnologyand soonMA in
Library Computer Science. Background in Libraries and a
littleIT e.g. consultment.
Leonard Janke: Born in Freiburg i. Br. (Germany) and
mainlyraisedin Bavaria. Background in Sociology,
Computer Linguisticsand familiaritywiththestartup
scence.

4. Fidele & Auvarique: IT PhDswithuniversitybackground
fromDschang(Cameroon). Fidele gavetheinitial ideafor
theproject. Auvariqueisinvolvedwithbookstores. Also
contactswithdevelopers, mainlyfromDschang.
Alex withexperiencein eBPFasan advisor.

5. One of the first, or maybe even the very first
philosopher who came up with the term “Morality”
was Immanuel Kant from Kaliningrad.
However: What does „Moral“ exactly mean? Moral is
normally used as a placeholder for „the good“.
Practically, moral argumentations are mostly just a
misuse.
Kant’s concept of morality strongly derives from
Xenophon’s memories of Socrates. It emphasize the

6. differentiation of success and anddoing the right
thing like Sokrateswhich even led to his death.
Baseline: Death = Moral.
Morality in the sense of Kant has nothing to do with
e.g. justice or many other topics that misuse the
term of morality –especially in an historical sense.

7. To address a more complex topic than that hackers
are not good persons, we talked about that
immorality reflects in cybersecurity in that way, that
there is a lot of lying going on in the industry. That is,
cybersecurity solutions are overprized and also
often do not work as good as PR and commercials
try to sell them.
Revenues in the cybersecurity industry were around
200 Billion USD in 2024. Actually, Microsoft makes
more money with their cybersecurity solutions than

8. with Office365 etc.
And even more ridiculously, although expensive,
their solutions do not even work as well, see the
following Forbes article from the slide. Because of
the bad value-for-money ratio, cyber solutions are
too easy to hack. So, there will be enough hackers
trying to make easy money here.

9. The sad part is that enterprises who are not buying
this overprized security software are being
presented as careless and as a safety
endangerment.
In Romania, it seems like there is not so much
cybersecurity going on right now. A ZF newspaper
report (see above slide) states that 60 % of all
Romanian enterprises do not have any kind of
cybersecurity implemented yet. However,
cybersecurity starts getting problematized in

10. Romanian enterprises, too. So, even if the state-of-
the-art cybersecurity solutions are costly and do not
work very good as we could learn from the previous
paragraph, state authorities force enterprises to buy
cybersecurity solutions by moralizing the topic. To
draw a conclusion/Baseline: Today’s cybersecurity
market seems moral at first glance, but actually it is
not.

11. But even if there is a lot of trickery going on in
cybersecurity today, we should not hiss the flag but
rather work on improving what is going on and build
a better future.
Our CSSO startup intends to contribute to this
project by improving existing cybersecurity
technologies in the following ways:
○
Uplifting Africa as an IT continent
○
Make cybersecurity more affordable
○
Technically improve existing cybersecurity

12. solutions
Everybody who is eager to join us or learn more
about us feel free to reach out to team@csso-
iam.com!
Last year, the Cybersecurity Center of the EU was
launched in Bucharest. The cybersecurity market is
an evolving market with good perspectives for the
future.
For students who have a knack for the Humanities or
fine arts, it may be interesting to combine that field
of interest with cybersecurity topics. An example:
Some students of Tudor Jarda Music High School
had classes in singing. A modern cybersecurity
approach that works with the human voice/sound
modulations is called “Voice recognition” and is
about identifying the voice of a specific person in
order to log her in to an application, e.g. her email
account.