Kevin Spacey’s New Leading Role: Cybersecurity

Oscar winner Kevin Spacey has been busy these days, but not just being an actor. Besides leading Hollywood’s Relativity Studios movie production unit, he’s the new spokesperson for Internet security company WISeKey.  He joined the FOX Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to discuss his new venture in cybersecurity.

“I’ve always been fascinated by this particular space. Now that I am the chairman of the studio, in light of the Sony hacks last year, this is a wake-up call for anybody, not just in my business but for any business. If you want to protect your content and you want to protect your intellectual property, now it’s my responsibility to make sure we do that,” he said.

During the interview, WISeKey CEO, Carlos Moreira joined in on the conversation and explained what the company does.

“There’s something like 50 billion devices to be connected to the Internet. We started with watches in Switzerland, a simple device that now connects to the Internet. In the future, everything connects to the Internet. WISeKey’s encryption provides identity, so every object has an identity. So when you send data to the cloud, everything is encrypted so nobody can hack you in the middle.”

Moreira also discussed vulnerability to hacks.

“We are very vulnerable, especially to previous encryption… Because all those back doors have been there for a while. Now this is going to be even more difficult if you don’t authenticate the product. So, now the trend is to put security at the product level not at the platform level. Anyone can hack the platform but if you put that at the product level, and you connect that to Block Chain for instance, then you have a pier to pier interaction between products,” he said.

The ‘House of Cards’ star also discussed his role as chairman of Relativity Studios.

“It’s a new chapter in my life. I finished my 12 years at The Old Vic Theatre in London, of which I was living there and running the theater… From my business partner, producing partners Dana Brunetti, who’s run my film company Trigger Street for all these years -- we are both now in a position where we get to green-light films, we get to make those decisions, and it’s an extraordinarily exciting opportunity for us to make movies that we want to get made,” Spacey noted.