Why Anhalt-Bitterfeld

Mansfeld-Südharz, Germany - September 29, 2025

How a Saxony-Anhalt county became the missing node in the EU's cyber map

The first time we visited Saxony-Anhalt, the wind carried the faint smell of bitumen and history. Forty years earlier, this region had been the largest synthetic-rubber complex in the East. Even today, it feels like a place that spent decades perfecting the chemistry of resilience, such as weather, pressure and time. It has simply swapped polymers for protocols. We did not choose Anhalt-Bitterfeld because it was convenient. We chose it, because the county had already spent a generation rehearsing the exact muscles a cyber-resilience cluster needs: the ability to re-tool under pressure, to turn toxic legacy into neutral substrate, and to do it with the lights on.

The numbers that convinced us were never the glossy ones people typically expect in a location brochure. Instead, we specifically looked out for the quiet, stubborn metrics that hide inside infrastructure balance-sheets, such as a 3.2-millisecond round-trip to DE-CIX Leipzig, ensuring that our honeypots can share IoCs with international sensor grids before an attacker's three-way-handshake is complete. And then there is the latency symmetry: the same dark fibre that lets us mirror Prague's SOC data in real time also reaches a variety of our defense networks, guaranteeing that civilian and military blue-teams train on the same packet traces without ever commingling clearances. Those three facts alone shrink the total-cost-of-ownership for any SME that wants Tier-III resilience at Tier-II prices, which is exactly the gap NIS2 will penalise if left unfilled.

But infrastructure is only half the story. The other half is the social analogue of packet-loss: if talent leaks away faster than you can replace it, every other metric collapses. Here the county's demographic curve, once one of the steepest ageing slopes in eastern Germany, has begun to flatten. The reason is structural. When the chemical plants shed 28 000 jobs in the nineties, the region responded with the largest dual-study programme Germany had ever seen, converting former shift supervisors into automation engineers almost overnight. That institutional memory is still alive: the same vocational schools that retrained PLC technicians now run IT infrastructure labs; the same instructors who taught PID loops now teach Python. Last year 41 percent of graduates stayed within 50 km of their secondary school, a retention rate Berlin can only dream of. We are simply plugging into a pipeline that never stopped iterating.

The third vector is regulatory topography. Anhalt-Bitterfeld sits inside a rare overlap of three primary funding envelopes: EFRE Saxony-Anhalt 2021-2027 (80 % aid intensity for digital infrastructure), the federal KMU-innovativ cyber-security call (up to 50 % grant), and the upcoming EU Cyber-Shield programme (estimated 60 % co-financing). A single 200-user SME can therefore stack 1.2 M€ of non-dilutive capital for a 1.5 M€ hardening project. That's something barely impossible in Munich or Hamburg where real-estate prices alone exhaust the cap-table. CypSec's role is to act as the aggregation layer: we pre-certify architectures, bundle applications, and run the shared compliance back-end so that even twelve-person manufacturers can obtain the same security posture as a DAX giant without hiring a single CISSP.

"Cyber-resilience is not a gift from the metropole. It is something you compile locally."

Finally, there is the intangible but decisive factor of narrative symmetry. Europe's cyber debate has spent two decades orbiting around the primary capitals, Brussels, Berlin and Paris, because that is where the regulatory gravity sits. Yet the most visceral breaches happen in places like Cloppenburg, Veszprém or Bitterfeld, where ransomware halts a paint factory for three days and the town's entire tax base smells the solvent going cold. Anchoring a resilience node here tells every county between the Elbe and the Danube that sovereignty is not a gift from the metropole but a thing you compile yourself, on premises, with sovereign tooling and a neighbour who once rewired a chlorine line at 3 a.m. and is happy to show you how. That is the chemistry we are really betting on: pride forged in shift-work and not flashy slide-decks.

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.