In the physical world, governments are responsible for keeping citizens and corporations safe from enemies. The digital world, so far, has been a little different. When it comes to cybersecurity and cyber attacks, most governments have spent much more time increasing their offensive capabilities than protecting companies and individuals.
The reason for this is, until recently, national security officials viewed digital networks as fairly benign and cyber attackers as unlikely threats to safety — or to a country’s sovereignty. However, the advent of cyber-physical systems and the internet of things, along with the increasing sophistication of bad actors, has made cyber attacks issues of human safety. But companies have largely been left to fend for themselves.
That’s why, over the last few years, tech-focused companies have begun entering into cybersecurity alliances and pacts with one another. These alliances are a symptom of the breakdown of trust between policy makers and those they’re making polices for. Hundreds of companies — some of them, such as Airbus, Cisco, HP, Microsoft, Siemens, and Telefonica, among the largest in the world — have tried to step into this trust gap by forming groups around goals related to the future of the internet and digital networks. Some of these groups (those I call the operational alliances) are mainly practical, sharing intelligence or technical data. Others (the normative alliances) are explicitly aimed at changing the ways companies deal with cybersecurity vulnerabilities and renegotiating the social contract between states and their citizens.
https://hbr.org/2019/09/why-companies-are-forming-cybersecurity-alliances
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