- OT cybersecurity company Rhebo celebrates its 10th anniversary
- Company looks back on eventful development from startup to part of the global Landis+Gyr family
- The next 10 years will be dominated by smart grid and IoT cybersecurity
The German company for the cyber security of operational technology networks, Rhebo, is celebrating its 10th anniversary and is planning further expansion in the coming years.
From a self-financed start-up...
Rhebo began as the idea of the three company founders Klaus Mochalski, Martin Menschner and Dr. Frank Stummer, who previously successfully led two IT security companies to an exit. Klaus Mochalski, one of the co-developers of modern deep packet inspection technology, joined the company as CEO. The technology was instrumental in the development of the first industrial intrusion detection system in Germany, which combined OT monitoring with anomaly detection. As Managing Director of Digital Forensics, Dr. Frank Stummer brought experience in the forensic analysis of cyber incidents, while Martin Menschner took over the technological lead as a long-standing CTO for cyber security products.
... to becoming part of the global Landis+Gyr family
The business idea of securing industrial infrastructures - especially those of highly automated companies and critical entities - against cyber attacks was a novelty on the German and international market in 2014. However, it quickly convinced various investors, who drove Rhebo's development forward over several funding rounds.
In 2015, Rhebo launched the first fully-fledged industrial intrusion detection system Rhebo Industrial Protector, which has since safeguarded a large number of critical infrastructures (electricity, gas, water, telecommunications) against multi-stage cyberattacks. In Germany alone, Rhebo's solutions have made the electricity supply more secure for over 29 million people by 2024. That represents 37% of the total area of Germany.
This was followed in 2020 by the go-to-market of the world's first intrusion detection system for (I)IoT edge devices, which already secured tens of thousands of Sonnen's globally distributed energy storage systems in 2019. Another “first” in 2019 was the integration of the Rhebo solution on the PLC automation platform ctrlX Automation by Bosch Rexroth.
“In 2014, we started in a market that did not yet have a real awareness of OT cybersecurity,” recalls co-founder Klaus Mochalski, who was CEO until 2022. “There weren't even any real terms for it yet. OT security only became established as a concept years later. That's why I'm all the more pleased and proud of everything Rhebo has achieved in all those years”.
One of the world's largest providers of energy and water management solutions, the Swiss group Landis+Gyr, also saw the potential and acquired Rhebo in 2021. Today, Rhebo's intrusion detection system secures over 130,000 systems and devices worldwide and has become an integral part of the Landis+Gyr security solution offering. Follow the development of Rhebo step by step from 2014 to today in our infographic.
The mission: edge-to-end OT cybersecurity
Rhebo's future lies both within Landis+Gyr's target group and beyond. The company kicked off this year with an edge-to-end cyber security offering that secures smart grids from the central control room and grid management to the head-end systems and edge devices such as energy storage and smart meters.
In addition, Rhebo is focusing on expanding its OT security services. “Skills shortages and a lack of expertise in industrial companies need to be bridged by managed services in the short term,” explains Réne Krause, Teamlead Services at Rhebo. “For this reason, we have been providing vulnerability assessments for OT environments since 2017 and have been offering the managed operation of our intrusion detection system since 2019. Our customers are clearly happy with this direct support.”
For Todd Wiedman, CSO of Landis+Gyr and CEO of Rhebo since 2022, the plans don't stop there: “Rhebo solutions can potentially be implemented in any digital edge device. The new collaboration between Landis+Gyr and Google gives us the opportunity to further develop Rhebo's intrusion detection system in an even more flexible and scalable way. Especially in the context of NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act in Europe as well as multiple international cyber security programs, we see a growing need and market there.”
