This agreement aims to protect consumers from cyber attacks. In addition, the companies involved in the agreement also promised not to help the government including the US government to "carry out cyber attacks on companies and innocent communities", as reported by The New York Times.
The driving force behind this coalition is Microsoft President Bradford L. Smith, who has the ultimate goal of creating a "Digital Geneva Convention" that will govern what kind of attacks can be exercised in digital warfare.
As stated in the agreement, there are four things that will be enhanced by the companies that signed this agreement.
Fourth, it helps protect consumers against future attacks, refuses to assist the government in launching cyber attacks, works to enhance developers and customers' ability to protect themselves and work together to share information about cyber threats and weaknesses.
Indeed, this agreement is still very limited. The agreement does not even include big companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon. Not only that, the companies involved in this agreement only come from the United States.
That means, companies from Russia, North Korea, Iran or China do not make the same agreement. However, this is a good start.
