Numerous tech leaders shun Obama’s cybersecurity summit

President Obama spoke at an important cybersecurity summit yesterday that was intended to address the massive increase in cyberattacks and data leaks in the past few years and how to combat them. There was hope that the summit would help bridge the gap between the public and private sectors in this regard but the absence of some very important tech leaders was quite noticeable. 

Today President Obama spoke at Stanford University at the Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection. In a wide-ranging conference, which touched on everything from biometric passwords to the economics of technology, the urgent theme that surfaced was the importance of the public and private sectors working together to crack one of the 21st century’s biggest challenges. The last six months have read like an A-Z of cybersecurity breaches ripping across industries, from retail (Target), to entertainment (Sony), to insurance (Anthem). According to U.S. Homeland Security, cybersecurity attacks have multiplied fivefold since 2009, with the seriousness of these breaches rising each year.