An ethical impact assessment is a structured review of how an AI system may affect rights, fairness, safety, and broader society before it is deployed. It asks practical questions: who could be harmed, which groups may be disadvantaged, what data is being used, and whether people can understand, challenge, or override the system’s output.
In cyber security, this matters because AI often sits inside access-control, hiring, monitoring, fraud detection, or content-filtering pipelines. If the model is biased, opaque, or easy to manipulate, it can create security and trust failures at scale: false denials, unsafe recommendations, privacy leaks, or abuse of automated decisions. Ethical impact assessments support defenders by forcing logging, human oversight, fallback procedures, and escalation paths before release. They are also useful against attackers, because they surface where a system may be vulnerable to data poisoning, prompt abuse, or discriminatory outcomes that weaken the organization’s resilience.