The former Brisbane Lions footballer, who is the coach of the North Albury Football Club, has also taken the unpredictable step of entering the cyber security market.

A triple premiership player and Brownlow medallist, Mr Akermanis is now a partner in new cybercrime venture, Splitlock. Still a master of the bold claim, he said his firm's technology will stop hackers in their tracks by making a company's data unreadable.

"I've always thought cybercrime was a one billion dollar problem, so if it's a one billion dollar product as a consequence, even better," Mr Akermanis said.

"We want to make the world we live in a whole lot safer. The crooks are now stealing your data, the evil has changed."

Mr Akermanis spent nine years playing in the midfield for the Brisbane Lions, where he became one of their best players. In 2007 he had a change of colours and joined the Western Bulldogs, where he played until July 2010 when the club sacked him, with sources telling Fairfax Media at the time that coaches and playing group felt that he did not consider the club a priority.  

Business interests

After leaving the Western Bulldogs, Mr Akermanis took his talents to the Glenorchy Football Club in Tasmania, but also started pursuing a business career, starting a company called Supersonic Global Payments.

Mr Akermanis said the Splitlock technology works by splitting data into pieces so that it is unreadable by hackers, even if they infiltrate a computer system or mobile device.

The cryptographic technology stores the separated pieces of data in separate locations, which can only be reunited with a specific cryptographic hash, which is password-protected.

Mr Akermanis is not the brains behind the technology; he came across it when Splitlock was purchased for $18 million by a payment systems company called Ezybonds, of which Mr Akermanis is a director.

Since then it has been patented in five countries, including Australia and the United States, and is awaiting approval in three others regions, including Europe. Mr Akermanis and the Ezybonds team are now looking for funding to commercialise the product, with hopes it will be in the hands of businesses and consumers by the end of the year.

"It doesn't need to be a $300 million investment," Mr Akermanis said. "Someone may offer $50 million and buy us out; otherwise if it's a partnership it'll be in the $2 million to $10 million range."

"[Splitlock] has to be global and it needs to be for the everyman user, so everyone has a downloadable version for their smartphone with an initial fee and then an ongoing yearly payment. But it will also be used by governments and businesses."

Future plans

Mr Akermanis said he has informally pitched the idea to Google and James Packer's investment organisation Consolidated Press Holdings, but sources at both organisations indicated that discussions were not ongoing.

Not everyone is so convinced by the technology itself, and a former Splitlock vice-president of product development, Leigh Stillard, said it was vulnerable to human error, so was not foolproof.

"Cryptographic hashes are used everywhere, but without passwords on them so they can't be reversed," he said.

"But the most insecure part of any computer system is the person sitting in front of it. We can do our best efforts, but the rest of it is up to the person."

Cyber security industry experts also had concerns about the strength of the technology, saying it was an interesting concept, but was weakened by the fact that it was password protected. 

"When compromising an end user station, the first thing hackers do is log the key strokes ... it could be possible to have non-password options though," one source said.

To make the password protection more secure, Splitlock uses a baseline password policy with specifications around the minimum length and the degree of complexity. It also supplies randomly generated passwords which are 150 characters long.

Despite his technology start-up ambitions, Mr Akermanis is not turning his back on football, having recently applied for a coaching role at Essendon, which he did not get. But he said if Splitlock succeeds, he will scale back his sporting commitments.

"If this ends up getting to where it should, then yes, I'll be spending more of my time over here [at Spitlock]," he said.