Ride the Lightning

Microsoft, Cisco and 32 Other Companies Sign 'Cybersecurity Tech Accord' to Boost Global Trust

April 23, 2018

Corporate Counsel reported last week that Microsoft, Cisco and 32 other companies have signed a 'Cybersecurity Tech Accord' to build global trust.

"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," Cisco GC Mark Chandler told Corporate Counsel on Tuesday.

So far this year, companies have seen a number of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks from private and government actors. So last Tuesday, 34 tech leaders took a public stand to defend consumers against such attacks, signing the first-ever "Cybersecurity Tech Accord." The accord aims to increase tech users' trust in tech companies and to build inter-company collaboration, as stated in four principles:

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."

Cisco Systems Inc. general counsel Mark Chandler emphasized the importance of the second principle—opposing cyberattacks on innocent citizens and enterprises and not helping governments launch such attacks.

Chandler says he joined the accord after ongoing discussions with Microsoft Corp. Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith who wrote 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 establishing 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 along with a number of U.S.-based tech companies, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Dell and Oracle.

It will interest me to see if these tech titans back up their words with actions.

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