Obama urges companies to work with gov't on cybersecurity

U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday called on private sector to work more closely and share more data on cyber threats with federal government in a summit on cybersecurity at Stanford University.

The White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection brought government officials and business executives together to help shape public and private sector efforts to protect American consumers and companies from network threats.

The one-day event aimed to address such topics as public-private collaboration on cybersecurity, improving cybersecurity practices and technology and promoting more secure payment technologies. Among the participants were CEOs from technology companies, financial institutions and other industries as well as secretaries of U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Department of Commerce.

In his keynote speech, Obama noted that countering cyber threats has to be a shared mission.

As so much of the country's computer networks and critical infrastructure are in the private sector," government cannot do this alone," he said. "But the fact is that the private sector can't do it alone either, because it's government that often has the latest information on new threats."

The only one way to defend America from these cyber threats are "through government and industry working together, sharing appropriate information as true partners," he said.

Obama signed an executive order right after the speech to promote public and private cooperation. The order encourages private sectors to create information sharing hubs for particular threats or in specific regions. It also gives government agencies authority to share cybersecurity data with the information hubs and companies easier access to secret cybersecurity information.

Cybersecurity has become Obama's top agenda this year as quite a number of American retailers, financial institutions and other companies reported consumer data breaches in past two years, with the Sony Picture attack and Athem being the recent cases.

Although the administration continuously asks technology companies for more cybersecurity cooperation and data-sharing, they are reluctant to do so, having concerns about privacy after the revelation of National Security Agency's online surveillance by Edward Snowden. It's reported that CEOs of tech giants Google, Facebook and Yahoo were invited to this summit but they chose to stay away. Endi