YekCity premiere at it-sa 2025 in Nuremberg
Nine months of development, then the first public demonstration at the largest IT security trade fair in Europe. What operators of critical infrastructure, municipal utilities and energy suppliers wanted to know about YekCity.
October 2025, Nuremberg. After nine months of research and development we presented YekCity in public for the first time, at it-sa, the largest IT security trade fair in Europe.
There was more interest than we expected. Operators of critical infrastructure, municipal utilities and energy suppliers came with the same question: "Can our teams train on it?"
What YekCity is
A miniature test environment for smart city infrastructure. A working power supply with generation, a control room and consumers, all on real industrial protocols.
Realistic OT attacks can be run on the platform. The effects are physically visible, the lights go out, and a SIEM logs every event in parallel while incident response is carried out to save the city.
Why we built it
YekCity started as an internal project. We needed a way to train our own team in OT security. Pentests in critical infrastructure require specialist knowledge; you cannot take an IT pentester and send them into a municipal utility.
Practising on live production systems is out of the question for good reasons. Pure software simulations stay too abstract. So we built something ourselves: real hardware, real protocols, real attack paths.
After almost nine months of development YekCity was finished, and it did what we needed. The it-sa presentation was only meant to show what we were working on.
What happened then
The demo was simple: an attack on the power grid using MMS and GOOSE, modelled on real attacks such as Industroyer2 (Ukraine, 2022). The lights go out. Two minutes.
The conversations afterwards were longer. Many visitors had the same problems:
- "Our SOC team does not know OT protocols"
- "How do we run realistic exercises, not just tabletops?"
- "Where can we practise without putting real plant at risk?"
- "How do I show our board what happens during an OT attack?"
What we offer now
We use YekCity in three places:
Internally: our team trains on the platform before running OT pentests at client sites.
Red and blue team exercises: your teams work through realistic scenarios. The red team attacks, the blue team has to detect and respond.
SOC training and detection tests: your analysts see what OT attacks look like in the SIEM and test their detection rules against real attacks.
Management demonstrations: show in a few minutes what a cyber attack on critical infrastructure does, without slides, with visible consequences.
Want to see YekCity live?
Talk to us and we will arrange a date, with no obligation.