RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Three tech giants with a major presence in the Research Triangle region are among the 34 signatories of the “Cybersecurity Tech Accord” announced Tuesday.

Cisco (RTP), ABB (Cary and Raleigh)and Oracle (Morrisville, Durham) joined Microsoft, Facebook and other companies in signing the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, through which companies say they are “agreeing to defend all customers everywhere from malicious attacks by cybercriminal enterprises and nation-states.”

As first reported by The New York Times, the companies also say they will not “help governments launch cyberattacks against innocent citizens and enterprises.”

The news comes a day after the US and United Kingdom warned that Russia had targeted Internet hardware for cyberespionage.

Both Facebook, with a big data operation in western North Carolina, and Microsoft, which has a major presence in Charlotte, have links to the Tar Heel state.

The accord covers four key points:

  • 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.

Signing companies

The list of signing companies:

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, and VMware.