Session Eight began with a small panel consisting of only four speakers on a topic that is very much relevant to our lives today.  Chairman Colin Williams, Director SBL, United Kingdom, Speakers: Michael Stankosky, Research Professor George Washington University, USA, Magnus Wakander, Deputy Head I2 Office, FMV, Sweden and Paul Wormeli, Executive Director Emeritus, Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute – IJIS; Innovation Strategist, Wormeli Consulting, LLC, USA. These four individuals discussed steps that need to be taken to protect the public and governmental industry against cyber attacks. In this day and age we are incapable of accomplishing half of what we need to do without the use of the Internet and computers. In order to maintain a level of control in this ever growing cyber space, there needs to be a level of understanding throughout nations to maintain a safe and secure web space. Each device connected to the Internet and wireless networks is a vector that is vulnerable to either large scale or small-scale cyber attacks. 

In order to perform risk management tasks and processes, companies and even those on personal networks need to have clearly defined critical assets. These assets need to reflect the most precious pieces of information that need to be protected above all of the others. Stankosky expressed that knowledge, data and information are the new currencies of the 21^st century. These are the types of assets that need to be clearly defined if a company or large corporation is going to protect themselves from attacks. Wormeli proposed a secure program where nations can safely share data pertaining to different platforms. All stake holders in the program, NIEM, must be represented and also must agree on what are core and common interests. Under U.S. law there are standards to a building a basis with sharing this information and must be done as a consensus. It is a starting point to conserving and protecting data shared online. There are some programs between Mexico, Canada and the US to share data on stolen cars, and in Canada they use it to share information pertaining to Visas.  NIEM is a starting point towards a secure way to share data between nations. 

Hopefully from this starting point, governments and firms similar to that of Paul Wormeli can decide on and develop programs that allow for secure sharing between nations.