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2018's not even half over yet, but companies have already seen a number of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks from private and government actors—and customers are noticing.

On Tuesday, 34 tech leaders took a public stance to protect consumers against such attacks, signing the first-ever “Cybersecurity Tech Accord.” The accord aims to increase tech users' trust in innovating companies and increase inter-company collaboration, as stated in four principles outlined here:

  1. Protect all users and customers everywhere, “irrespective of their technical acumen, culture or location, or the motives of the attacker.”
  2. Oppose cyberattacks on civilians and enterprises and protect against “tampering with and exploitation of technology products and services during their development, design, distribution and use.” Refuse to help governments launch attacks on innocent users and enterprises.
  3. Provide tech users with the “information and tools that enable them to understand current and future threats and protect themselves,” and provide governments and NGOs worldwide with the support needed to boost security.
  4. Work with others in the tech industry to “improve technical collaboration, coordinated vulnerability disclosure, and threat sharing, as well as to minimize the levels of malicious code being introduced into cyberspace.”

In an interview with Corporate Counsel on Tuesday, Cisco Systems Inc. general counsel Mark Chandler, whose company signed the accord, emphasized the importance of the second principle—opposing cyberattacks on innocent citizens and enterprises and not helping governments launch such attacks.

All of the stated principles in the accord are ideas he notes Cisco and many other tech companies have been “living by for years,” but he said they're important to publicly state. 

“By putting ourselves out there in this way, it will result in civil society and other organizations looking for other ways to hold the industry to account, in an age where talk is cheap,” Chandler said.

Chandler says he joined the accord after ongoing discussions with Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith wrote Tuesday that the movement to create the accord began at last year's RSA Conference in San Francisco, when his company called for industry collaboration in creating new measures to protect technology users from cyberattacks.

“We called on the world to borrow a page from history in the form of a Digital Geneva Convention, a long-term goal of updating international law to protect people in times of peace from malicious cyberattacks,” Smith wrote. “But as we also said at RSA last year, the first step in creating a safer internet must come from our own industry, the enterprises that create and operate the world's online technologies and infrastructure.”

Microsoft signed the accord alongside a number of U.S.-based tech companies, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Dell and Oracle, and foreign-based companies such as Madrid-based Telefónica. The accord aims to boost collaboration among these companies and technology, civil society and security researchers to reduce cyberattacks.

“Protecting our online environment is in everyone's interest. The companies that are part of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord promise to defend and advance technology's benefits for society,” Smith wrote. “And we commit to act responsibly, to protect and empower our users and customers, and help create a safer and more secure online world.”