LG Acquires Cybellum

LG Electronics, will snapping up Cybellum, an Israeli automotive cybersecurity specialist that detects and assesses vulnerabilities in connected vehicle services and hardware by way of a “digital twin” approach.

LG has been building a profile as an investor in interesting automotive startups, but this is its first acquisition out of Israel Cybellum is based in Tel Aviv and points to the bigger company’s interest not just in hardware but in providing software solutions to the automotive industry.

The startup which was founded in 2016 by Slava Bronfman and Michael Engstler, two cybersecurity alums from the Israeli Defense Forces has over the years picked up a number of big-name customers using its technology, including Jaguar Land Rover and Nissan, with its partners including Harman, Toyota Tsusho and PTC.

Connected vehicles represent a new attack vector for malicious hackers, and a very complicated one, when you consider the multiple components that go into vehicles, and the numerous OEMs and automotive companies at work in the bigger ecosystem of the vehicle. That will only become more complex as vehicles evolve to be “smarter,” more connected and eventually more autonomous.

Cybellum’s approach is to create a so called “digital twin” of the system an approach also taken in the worlds of enterprise IT and healthcare and to monitor this as a way of capturing the full picture to identify and assess threats. This is one way of bridging fragmentation among individual components, while being able to monitor events in real time without straining the systems of the vehicle itself.