New Studio Boss Kevin Spacey Fears Hollywood Hack

"House of Cards" star Kevin Spacey said Wednesday his new role as a studio boss made him doubly fearful that material could be destroyed or leaked in a repeat of the Sony Pictures hack last year.

"Obviously the Sony hack was a wake-up call for anyone in my industry, and I would think for anyone in any industry," Spacey told a debate on cyber-security at the gathering of the rich and powerful in a Swiss ski resort that also featured Wikipedia's founder and the creator of the World Wide Web

"It caused a tremendous amount of damage, I was personally affected by it and obviously it became the point of a great amount of controversy and issues of how does a company go about protecting itself," he said.

Spacey said he had to change his email address after his conversations with Sony were released by WikiLeaks following the massive hack that involved the release of stolen data including many still-to-be-released films, and also revealed an executive's unflattering comments about Angelina Jolie.

Taking over as head of Relativity Studios two weeks ago had made him acutely aware of the dangers of content being released against its creator's will.

He said: "For me now, the issue of content protection, and protection of intellectual property is even more important.

"From the artist's point of view, a person's IP is their identity, it is what they hold dear, it is the way we know their work.

"We hope that as things go forward, artists will be able to protect that identity and they'll be able to get the kind of credit they deserve."

Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who created the first web page 25 years ago, told the debate in Davos that the problems facing those seeking to protect the Internet were immense.

"No matter how smart you think you have been, there is always someone out there being paid a lot of money to figure out where you have slipped up," he said.

Jimmy Wales, who founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, urged companies and states to start spending "big money" to secure their systems.

But he also called for security systems to be "inter-operable", using the theoretical example of a fridge only able to cool one brand of cola and not another.