Who is behind TKG-Readiness

tkg-readiness.de is run by Blackfort Technology UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Ernst-Robert-Curtius-Straße 8A, 53117 Bonn, Germany. The company has been entered in the commercial register of the Bonn Local Court since 2017 (HRB 23120) and is owner-managed. We work in information security, compliance and technical implementation, so regulatory assessment and implementation in your systems come from the same project. Founder and managing director is Christian Gebhardt.

What TKG-Readiness is

TKG-Readiness brings together our services for telecom security under the German Telecommunications Act (Telekommunikationsgesetz, TKG). It is aimed at small and mid-sized operators of public telecommunications networks and providers of publicly available telecommunications services, including providers based abroad that are active in Germany. Our aim is telecom security under the TKG without a major project: the security concept under Section 166 TKG, the security officer and the NIS2 duties in the TKG at fixed fees, written in the language of the Bundesnetzagentur (BNetzA), the German Federal Network Agency.

What you get are results you can keep working with: a security concept that follows the structure of the catalogue of security requirements, a clear answer to who holds the role of security officer, a written incident reporting procedure with responsibilities, and evidence from which your management can see the state of implementation.

An overview of our services is on the home page. The security concept under Section 166 TKG and the security officer under Section 166 TKG each have their own page, and providers based outside Germany find their starting points on the page for telecom providers based abroad.

Our experience in telecommunications

We have acted as security officers under Section 166 TKG and have drawn up and updated security concepts and agreed them with the Bundesnetzagentur.

Founder and managing director: Christian Gebhardt

Christian Gebhardt, Managing Director since 2017

• Permanent member of the AI Expert Working Group
  Alliance for Cyber Security / BSI
• Co-author: "Guidelines for Penetration Testing of Large Language Models" (ACS/BSI)

Christian Gebhardt founded Blackfort Technology in 2017 - alongside his role as an audit specialist at Deutsche Bank.

The professional background he brought with him continues to shape how Blackfort works today. He started as a working student at BWI Informationstechnik, the IT service provider of the German Federal Armed Forces, and stayed for seven years. From 2011 he worked there as an IT Solution Architect and systems engineer, responsible for directory services, identity and access management and the BWI PKI based on the PKI of the German Armed Forces. This was followed by roles at exceet Secure Solutions in the Gematik telehealth infrastructure with a focus on PKI and Hardware Security Modules, and at TÜV Trust IT, where he led ISO 27001 ISMS build-out projects at municipal critical infrastructure organisations.

Deutsche Bank opened the perspective of independent review: audit leadership in highly regulated domains - BAIT, MaRisk, ZAG, KRITIS - covering topics such as information security management, payment processing, PKI and data centre security. This experience often revealed just how far apart documented requirements and lived practice can be.

After his role as Information Security Officer at Gothaer Solutions GmbH, he became Deputy CISO in 2021, leading the information security team with a direct reporting line to the board member responsible for IT.

In parallel, from 2021 to 2023 he served as Managing Director of ArcSin GmbH, a company specialising in artificial intelligence and cryptography with a focus on massively parallel processing in distributed systems - an early engagement with AI architecture well before the topic became mainstream for security organisations.

In the field of AI security, he is a permanent member of the AI Expert Working Group of the Alliance for Cyber Security (ACS/BSI). He co-authored the ACS "Guidelines for Penetration Testing of Large Language Models" (2025) and wrote its first draft. This work concerns AI security. TKG-Readiness is not a service of the BSI or of the Bundesnetzagentur.

How we work

Our approach has five steps:

1. Understand systems and dependencies: which services, facilities, contractors and platforms your operation relies on.
2. Identify risks: where measures are missing or do not work.
3. Derive measures: a prioritised plan with owners and sequence.
4. Implement them technically: together with your teams we put configuration, processes and documentation in place.
5. File the evidence: so that management and auditors can follow what has been implemented.

Your enquiry is received by Christian Gebhardt as founder and managing director, and we set out who works on the project in our offer. We work in German or English, by video call and on site where the project needs it.

Provider information

The provider of this website and contracting party for all TKG-Readiness services is:

Blackfort Technology UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
Ernst-Robert-Curtius-Straße 8A
53117 Bonn, Germany

The full provider identification is in the imprint. Our services are offered to businesses only (Section 14 of the German Civil Code, BGB).

Why we do not name clients

We do not name clients on this website, because confidentiality is part of advisory work. Instead of references, we show our method and sample results.

Blackfort Technology is a partner of Tenable, Rapid7 and DigiCert. These partnerships concern security tools and certificate services.

What you can expect from us

• We back statements on laws and regulations with the provision and the date of the version we checked.
• We say what the law requires, what we recommend and what is an example, and keep these visibly apart.
• On the TKG and other legislation we provide general information. The legal assessment of your case belongs with a lawyer admitted in Germany.