Alfred Kärcher SE & Co. KG operates a global attack surface across 170 companies in 87 countries, with 2025 sales of €3.483 billion. The family-owned cleaning technology manufacturer, founded in 1935 and headquartered in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, runs a massive, distributed enterprise environment - every connected pressure washer, industrial scrubber, and IoT-enabled cleaning system is a potential entry point. The threat model scales with 17,000 employees and a sprawling international supply chain.
Internally, over 1,000 R&D staff drive product innovation, meaning IP protection and secure development lifecycles are core to the mission. The company's culture emphasizes breaking new ground with conviction, which likely extends to its security posture - protecting manufacturing systems, customer data, and proprietary cleaning technology designs. For a physical-world industrial company of this scale, the cybersecurity challenge spans OT/IT convergence, global infrastructure hardening, and defending trade secrets in a competitive market.
