As tech and other industry CEOs visited the White House for a summit on cybersecurity, one NSA hacker-turned-security researcher stressed that the private sector can play a key role in protecting the U.S. grid.

"If you think about it, at least in the U.S., the majority of the critical infrastructure is both owned and operated by the private sector," Patrick Wardle, a former National Security Agency hacker and founder of mac OS security company Objective-See, told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). "So I think it's really a no brainer for the government... to bring the private sector and figure out ways to collaborate and work together to address this ever-growing threat."

Critical infrastructure includes networks that are necessary to maintain normalcy in daily life such as highways, bridges and tunnels, railways, utilities, and certain buildings.

President Biden echoed Wardle's sentiment at Wednesday's meeting, stating: "The reality is, most of our critical infrastructure... is owned and operated by the private sector, and the federal government can’t meet this challenge alone. So I’ve invited you all here today because you have the power, the capacity, and the responsibility, I believe, to raise the bar on cybersecurity."

Wardle noted that recent incidents including a cyber-espionage campaign targeting software company SolarWinds and ransomware attacks that disrupted a major U.S. gasoline pipeline have raised the stakes.

"I think this is why they say now we really need to kind of band together the private and the government sectors and really make a push," he said.

Furthermore, given the lack of cybersecurity hygiene across both government and company networks, there are some simple fixes that can be pursued.

"If the government starts to collaborate more with the private industry, really try to maybe standardize some best practices, maybe we can address some of the low-hanging fruit — which will prevent, hopefully, at least some of these these attacks," he said.

That low-hanging fruit includes widespread use of dual-factor authentication and other best practices that are already standardized in the most secure private sector companies.

"I draw a lot of parallels to the current pandemic," Wardle said. "We have a lot of the tools already. So... for COVID we have vaccines, we have mass mandates, social distancing. We kind of know what works. The issue, though, is in the implementation."

Inviting (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy, Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella, IBM (IBM) CEO Arvind Krishna, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon, and leaders from other industries to White House was a solid first step, according to Wardle.