Limes Security, an established Austrian security consulting company in the OT sector (Hagenberg/Vienna) and Alpha Strike Labs, an innovative German-Austrian security company (Berlin/Vienna), are joining forces for a common future.
“The aim of the merger is to expand our competences and resources and to grow into one of the leading companies for OT security in the DACH region and Europe overall, in order to be a counterweight to American and Israeli security companies. In particular, the new German base in Berlin will help us to achieve that”, explains Prof. Thomas Brandstetter, managing director of Limes Security and continues: “Alpha Strike Labs is a much younger company and brings excellent technology knowledge from university research as well as many interesting product and service ideas, especially in the field of Open Source Intelligence”.
Johannes Klick, CEO of Alpha Strike Labs in Berlin on the merger: “We are convinced that Limes Security is definitely the right partner for further growth in OT Security. The excellent development of Alpha Strike Labs in the past year has shown that there is a lot of demand in the market. Together with our colleagues from Limes Security, we will be closer to our customers through the many locations and will thus be able to support them better”.
Tobias Zillner, Managing Director of Alpha Strike Labs in Vienna: “I see the advantage not only in the bundling of resources, but also in the fact that our teams have different know-how, be it in the area of security training, product security incident response, embedded security and OSINT. It is precisely this diversified know-how that we will be able to leverage even better to address the diverse issues of our existing industrial customers”.
The merger is to be completed by the end of 2019. As of January 1, 2020, three national companies are planned: Limes Security with headquarters in Hagenberg (AT) and Limes Security Germany with headquarters in Berlin (DE), as well as Limes Security Nordic with headquarters in Copenhagen (DK). The newly founded Alpha Limes Group is assigned as the holding company for the purpose of overall corporate management. The Alpha Limes Group will enable the new group of companies to be prepared even better for future corporate changes such as investments or acquisitions.
The Alpha Strike Labs brand will be used as an independent brand for research and innovation purposes. In Alpha Strike Labs, bleeding edge vulnerability research is carried out, new attack methods are researched, as well as topics for better attack detection with honeypots and OSINT/Threat Intelligence. Finally, it will also act as an incubator for future product and service ideas.
“To further expand our competence/market position, our newly created Alpha Strike Labs will focus on innovation and research. But of course our customers remain the most important element for us. Nothing changes for them except that we can now support them with a bit more and more specific security issues. What definitely remains is our vendor independence, which has earned us a lot of customer trust.” comments Peter Panholzer, managing partner of Limes Security, who is also looking forward to the merger.
About the two companies
Limes Security GmbH has been offering vendor-independent security consulting in the areas of OT security and secure software development since 2012. Its customers are mainly well-known national and international companies from the production sector as well as critical infrastructure. Limes Security’s sustainable corporate management has recently been recognized in the “Club of Winners” at the Best Business Awards competition.
Alpha Strike Labs GmbH is a young company offering IT/OT security services. These are the simulation of real hacker attacks, the identification of potential external attack surface by means of Open Source Intelligence and global comprehensive Internet scans, as well as the creation of individual IoT security concepts. The innovative approaches of Alpha Strike Labs were also nominated among the best 18 security start-ups in the DACH region in the UP18@it-sa Security Start-Up competition in 2018.
Contact
Limes Security GmbH: Thomas Brandstetter, tbr@limessecurity.com
Alphas Strike Labs GmbH: Tobias Zillner, t.zillner@alphastrike.io
