President Obama hosted the first White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford University in California on Friday.

The event aimed to bolster cybersecurity by spurring collaboration between the public and private sectors in a bid to improve data security and protect critical infrastructure.

"It's one of the great paradoxes of our time that the very technologies that empower us to do great good can also be used to undermine us and inflict great harm," Mr. Obama said, addressing the summit.