Nokia, Cisco, BT, Telefónica and Microsoft among new cybercrime-fighting cabal

34 tech and telecoms companies have signed a pledge to fight cyberattacks from criminal enterprises and nation-states.

The thing they signed is called the Cybersecurity Tech Accord and its creation seems to have been prompted by the growing trend of cyber-horridness coming from places like Russia and the apparent need for great global coordination to combat it. Microsoft seems to be taking the lead on this project, which is fair enough since its OS is the recipient of most of this aggro, but a fairly broad range of major tech companies have jumped on-board.

“The devastating attacks from the past year demonstrate that cybersecurity is not just about what any single company can do but also about what we can all do together.” said Microsoft President Brad Smith. “This tech sector accord will help us take a principled path towards more effective steps to work together and defend customers around the world.”

Here are the four cornerstones to this group effort as detailed in the announcement:

Stronger defense

The companies will mount a stronger defense against cyberattacks. As part of this, recognizing that everyone deserves protection, the companies pledged to protect all customers globally regardless of the motivation for attacks online.

No offense

The companies will not help governments launch cyberattacks against innocent citizens and enterprises, and will protect against tampering or exploitation of their products and services through every stage of technology development, design and distribution.

Capacity building

The companies will do more to empower developers and the people and businesses that use their technology, helping them improve their capacity for protecting themselves. This may include joint work on new security practices and new features the companies can deploy in their individual products and services.

Collective action

The companies will build on existing relationships and together establish new formal and informal partnerships with industry, civil society and security researchers to improve technical collaboration, coordinate vulnerability disclosures, share threats and minimize the potential for malicious code to be introduced into cyberspace.

“The Tech Accord will help to protect the integrity of the one trillion connected devices we expect to see deployed within the next 20 years,” said Carolyn Herzog, General Counsel at Arm. “It aligns the resources, expertise and thinking of some of the world’s most important technology companies to help to build a trusted foundation for technology users who will benefit immensely from a more security connected world.”

Here’s the full list of signatories and they must be serious about this because they’ve made a corporate video and everything: ABB | ARM | AVAST | BITDEFENDER | BT | CA TECHNOLOGIES | CISCO | CLOUDFLARE | DATASTAX | DELL | DOCUSIGN | FACEBOOK | FASTLY | FIREEYE | F-SECURE | GITHUB | GUARDTIME | HP INC | HPE | INTUIT | JUNIPER NETWORKS | LINKEDIN | MICROSOFT | NIELSEN | NOKIA | ORACLE | RSA | SAP | STRIPE | SYMANTEC | TELEFONICA | TENABLE | TRENDMICRO | VMWARE