An industry group of 34 high-tech companies led by Microsoft, have signed today a tech accord, agreeing to defend customers at all costs from cybercriminal and nation-state cyber-attacks, but also not to provide any technical aid to governments looking to launch cyber-attacks on other countries, companies, or individual users.

Companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco, GitHub, Arm, Cloudflare, LinkedIn, HP, Dell, SAP, Oracle, and VMWare have signed the agreement, titled the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, albeit some big names are notably missing, such as Apple, Google, Amazon, and Intel.

The accord wants to be the Digital Geneva Convention

The accord is the brainchild of Microsoft Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith, who's been talking for almost two years about the creation of a Digital Geneva Convention.

Smith has been advocating that governments should not target users and the private sectors as part of their cyber-attacks aimed at other countries. He's been pushing for the idea that tech companies should be more like the Red Cross, instead of pawns on the cyber-battleground.

Other executives have picked up Smith's train of thaught after seemingly government-backed ransomware outbreaks like WannaCry, NotPetya, and Bad Rabbit have caused billions in damages to the private sector in 2017.

IBM X-Force graph compares last year's ransomware outbreaks. WannaCry was by far the most damaging incident. pic.twitter.com/HiyHox047p — Catalin Cimpanu (@campuscodi) April 5, 2018

The accord, announced today at the RSA 2018 security conference held in San Francisco, has been built around four major principles:

1) Strong defense - Tech companies should do their best to protect users from any type of cyber-attack, regardless of source, or the user's native country.

2) No offense - Tech companies should never provide material support to government-backed cyber-attacks.

3) Capacity building - Companies should build and provide customers with the necessary tools to protect their data and themselves from state-sponsored attacks.

4) Collective action - Companies will collaborate with each other to share data on attacks and disclose attacks to affected users.

Now, for the hard part —getting governments to abide to this agreement. All the tech accords in the world won't be valid in the face of court orders or abusive search warrants that some governments may use to hunt down dissidents or political adversaries.

Below are the 34 high-tech firms that signed the tech accord today. Many of them have published blog posts explaining the reasons they decided to sign today's tech accord.

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

TREND MICRO

VMWARE