News

ATHENE UP26@it-sa finalists: An interview with Fuzzware
On stage in Miami, the team hacked into the US power grid live and realised afterwards that critical infrastructure needs more robust security testing. Today, Fuzzware automatically tests the firmware of embedded systems for vulnerabilities, without the need for a physical device or source code. In this interview, the founders explain how a successful hack led to the creation of a company – and what the most difficult step in the process was.
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ATHENE Startup Award UP26@it-sa: Five finalists have been selected
The finalists for the ATHENE Startup Award UP26@it-sa have been selected. Fuzzware, SQUR, Complioty, RedCastle and Blindsight will compete against each other in the final on 28 October 2026 as part of the it-sa Expo & Congress in Nuremberg. This annual award recognises the most promising cybersecurity start-ups in the DACH region.
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Study: The external vulnerabilities of federal ministries' IT systems
Just how secure are the IT systems of federal ministries? A recent ATHENE study assessed their external attack surface and revealed significant gaps in their current security posture.
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Successful Submission at Crypto 2026
As the flagship conference of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), the International Cryptology Conference—known as Crypto for short—is one of the world’s leading academic events in the field of cryptography. A paper co-authored by ATHENE researcher Prof. Dr. Sebastian Faust of TU Darmstadt, along with other researchers from the University of Warsaw, the IDEAS Institute, and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, will be presented at this highly regarded conference.
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Paper accepted at USENIX Security 2026
The USENIX Security Symposium is one of the world’s most prestigious cybersecurity research conferences, bringing together researchers, practitioners and developers each year to present and discuss the latest findings on security and privacy in computer systems and networks. Once again this year, papers co-authored by ATHENE researchers from TU Darmstadt have been accepted for presentation at this prestigious conference.
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Successful submissions to ACL 2026
At the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), ATHENE researcher Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych and her colleagues presented numerous research papers. A paper co-authored by ATHENE researchers Prof. Dr. Anna Rohrbach and Prof. Dr. Marcus Rohrbach was also honored with the Best Resource Paper Award. This highly regarded conference brings together researchers and experts in the field of computational linguistics and language technology (natural language processing) to discuss the latest developments in this area.
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