34 major tech firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Nokia, HPE and HP on Tuesday signed an accord to the protect the customers across the globe from increasing number of cyber-attacks.

The Cybersecurity Tech Accord is based on four principles:

• To protect users and customers across the world,
• To abstain from helping any government from launching cyber-attacks on innocent      citizens and enterprises
• To empower users, customers, developers to bolster their cybersecurity defences
• To establish partnerships between industry, security researchers and civil society to      improve cybersecurity

Speaking on the accord, Microsoft president Brad Smith said it would help the technology stakeholders to enhance collaboration to defend the customers everywhere.

“The devastating attacks from the past year demonstrate that cybersecurity is not just about what any single company can do but also about what we can all do together. This tech sector accord will help us take a principled path toward more effective steps to work together and defend customers around the world,” he said.

The accord members will hold their first meeting during the ongoing RSA Conference in San Francisco

Those signed the accord include ABB, Facebook, BitDefender, Cisco, CA Technologies, DataStax, Cloudflare, Dell, Avast, Arm, GitHub, Guardtime, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Juniper Networks, Nielsen, HPE, Nokia, F-Secure, Trend MicroBT, DocuSign, Symantec, Oracle, RSA, SAP, Stripe, Tenable, Vmware, Telefonica, Fastly, HP Inc.FireEye and Intuit.

Surprisingly, several other leading tech firms such as Google, Apple and Twitter were not on the list.

The accord members will hold their first meeting during the ongoing RSA Conference in San Francisco.

The initial meetings will be focused on capacity building and collective action while in future, the members will consider joint actions such as common guidelines and broadly deployed features and information sharing.

Kirstjen Nielsen, U.S Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has hailed the accord and said it would help the governments in the fight against cyber crimes.

“The threats today are too big, too widespread to fight alone. We have to voluntarily come together in the absence of true rules in the cyber realm,” she said.