AT&T and Verizon were among several companies which joined a US effort to implement consistent cybersecurity measures across government agencies and private entities.

Other notable names on the Joint Cyber Defence Collaborative are Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft. The programme was established by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which explained in a statement it aimed to deliver comprehensive systems nationwide.

CISA stated the group would work towards a goal of “pre-empting cyberattacks and responding in unison to any security breaches that do occur”.

One of the group’s first priorities will be combatting and preventing ransomware attacks: CISA noted recent attacks had “an impact on our critical infrastructure community and caused downstream consequences” to the public.

The Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative will also focus on developing a “framework to coordinate incidents affecting cloud service providers”.

Joining the operators and cloud service providers in the project are security specialists Crowdstrike, FireEye Mandiant and Palo Alto Networks. ISP Lumen Technologies is also participating.

Government partners joining the effort include the Departments of Defence and Justice, National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Cyber Command and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.