IT giants will sign the Digital Geneva Convention

Technology companies have publicly stated their refusal to participate in cyberattacks orchestrated by any government. Microsoft, Facebook and 32 other global IT companies on Tuesday announced a joint pledge not to help any government carry out such strikes. The document was published on the Microsoft blog and is called “Digital Geneva Convention”.

Digital Geneva Convention, which promises to protect all customers from attacks, regardless from geopolitical or criminal motives, follows a year that has seen an unprecedented level of destructive cyberattacks, including the global WannaCry worm and the devastating NotPetya attack.

“We recognize that we live in a new world,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said during a speech Tuesday at the RSA Cybersecurity Conference in San Francisco. “We are in the middle of a generation of new weapons, where cyberspace has become the new battleground.”

Smith, who led the effort to organize the alliance, said the devastating cyberattacks in 2017 demonstrated the need for the technology sector to “take fundamental steps toward more effective measures to work together and protect users around the world.”

It is not yet clear whether the companies changed their existing policies as a result of the agreement. In addition, it is obvious that not all countries will join the agreement. 

The document builds on the idea of ​​the so-called Digital Geneva Convention, with a proposal to create an international body to protect civilians from state-sponsored hacking. The agreement contains basic principles, the main one of which is protecting everyone from cyber attacks. Regardless of the reasons for cyberattacks on citizens, be it government interests or fraud, alliance members are committed to providing assistance and protection to any country or user. The agreement promises to establish new formal and informal partnerships in the security research industry to coordinate the disclosure of cyber vulnerabilities.

Countries, Smith said, must develop global rules for cyberattacks similar to those established for armed conflict in the 1949 Geneva Convention, which followed World War II.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a number of questions about the agreement, including whether the company was involved in government-sponsored offensives cyber operations.

In addition to Microsoft and Facebook, 32 other companies have joined the agreement, including Cisco, Juniper Networks, Oracle, Nokia, SAP, Dell, Symantec, FireEye and Trend Micro..

The list of companies does not include representatives of Russia, China, Iran or North Korea, which are considered the most active in launching destructive cyber attacks on their opponents.

US IT giants Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Twitter have not yet signed the agreement.