Anatomy of a Cyber-Security Cluster

Mansfeld-Südharz, Germany - October 5, 2025

From shared coffee pots to shared threat intel

Clusters are the rarest kind of alchemy: take competing companies, hurl them into the same postal code, add cheap rent and espresso, and wait for innovation to drip out. Except the recipe rarely works without a binding agent stronger than caffeine. After eighteen months of assembling the Cyber Resilience Alliance we now have a parts list that is embarrassingly low-tech: one part legal glue, one part data plumbing, one part revolving talent door, and a surprisingly large part that is simply the smell of burnt solder at 2 a.m. shared across hallway walls. The anatomy is not glamorous, but it is reproducible, and every ligament we leave out shows up six months later as a hairline fracture in the growth curve.

The first vertebra is the lowest common data layer. Before anyone talks co-opetition, they have to agree on a format for the information they are terrified to share. We started with the humble Indicators of Compromise (IOC) because even the most paranoid vendor will part with MD5 hashes that are already on VirusTotal. The trick was to make sharing cheaper than hoarding: a zero-cost TAXII server hosted inside the county administration, paid from the IT line item that already keeps the printer alive. Participants drop STIX bundles into a shared collection, and a cron job anonymises source tags after 90 days, stripping attribution but preserving context. The moment a firm sees its own IOC reappear in another firm’s alert feed with a severity bump, the psychological penny drops: sharing does not dilute competitive advantage; it dilutes attacker advantage. Today the repository holds 1.4 million artefacts, but the real metric is the silence: no one has invoked the opt-out clause in eight months, which means the glue has set.

Next comes the governance cartilage—boring until it snaps. We borrowed the ancient German model of the “Planungsgemeinschaft” (planning association) that once coordinated water pipes between rival municipalities. Translated into cyber, the body is a registered society under civil law, co-owned by any local company that pays a €500 annual fee and signs a one-page pledge not to sue fellow members over shared threat data. The society owns no IP; it only owns process: the right to convene, to vote on data formats, and to expel anyone who repeatedly violates the anonymisation rule. The board meets monthly in the same room where county councillors once debated sewage tariffs, which lends an unconscious rhythm of accountability: if you can argue about phosphates, you can argue about SHA-256. The society’s only paid employee is a part-time clerk who keeps the minutes and issues invoices for the shared SOC that runs on the society’s bank account. That tiny administrative core—one salary, one ledger—acts as the spinal cord through which every future joint purchase travels, preventing the cluster from dissolving into ad-hoc coffee clubs the moment a big customer tempts everyone with exclusive NDAs.

Talent ligaments are sneakier. Poaching is the favourite sport of cyber clusters everywhere, so we inverted the incentive: instead of promising engineers higher salaries, we promise them more employers. The Alliance funds a “rotating desk” programme: any participating firm can release an engineer for three-month secondments at another cluster member while continuing to pay the original salary. The host company gains expertise it could not recruit, the engineer gains cross-training, and the original employer returns a staffer who now knows how rivals solve the same problem. The programme costs virtually nothing—just a standardised secondment contract stored in the society’s Git repo—but it dissolves the zero-sum mindset that usually poisons small ecosystems. After twelve cycles we noticed that engineers started sharing private Slack channels before management had signed the paperwork, a behavioural tell that the ligament had knitted itself.

"Clusters survive when the glue is stronger than the glitter—shared data, shared benches, shared 3 a.m. solder smoke."

Physical proximity helps, but not in the way urban planners think. The cluster occupies a cruciform of refurbished halls whose longest corridor is exactly 87 metres—long enough for a cigarette walk, short enough to overhear two conversations. The acoustic trick is deliberate: we removed drop ceilings and painted the walls with matte blackboard paint, turning circulation space into informal whiteboards. Ideas travel faster when you can physically point at a packet trace while balancing a coffee cup. The second physical hack is a communal workshop that is bookable only in 24-hour blocks, forcing teams from different firms to share the same soldering stations at 3 a.m. Nothing builds trust like jointly debugging a mis-flashed BIOS at an ungodly hour; the next morning you remember the face, not the corporate logo on the lanyard. Real estate agents wanted to partition the hall into rentable cubes; we kept it open and subsidised the lost rent from the county marketing budget, recognising that the intangible glue was worth more per square metre than any tenant could pay.

The Cyber Resilience Alliance is a public-private partnership established 2025, led by CypSec, Validato and the County of Mansfeld-Südharz. The Alliance operates a sovereign private-cloud security stack, a shared SOC and an cyber academy, aiming to make Mansfeld-Südharz the reference site for rural cyber resilience by 2030.

Media Contact: Daria Fediay, Chief Executive Officer at CypSec - daria.fediay@cypsec.de.