US and China governments join forces to fight cybercrime

The two nations have agreed to co-operate with any requests to investigate cybercrimes, collect electronic evidence and mitigate malicious cyber activity emanating from their territories.

The two governments have also agreed that neither would conduct nor knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information, with the internet of providing competitive advantages to individual companies or commercial sectors.

Under the new agreement, the US and China have also committed to working towards the identification and promotion of appropriate norms of state behaviour in cyberspace within the international community.

In order to formulate this, the countries will seek to create a group of senior experts to discuss the topic, and will also establish a new high-level joint dialogue mechanism for further discussions, with the first meeting to be held by the end of 2015, followed by semi-annual meetings.