Reported by The Guardian
Acts of greyzone aggression aim to spread panic. Europe has to show the saboteurs that we are resilient
I t was as though a ghostly hand had switched the settings on supermarket freezers across Europe from “freeze” to “defrost”. From Finland to Ireland, they suddenly began heating up , many reaching 50C and food worth millions of euros had to be thrown away. But no actual hand was needed to cause the meltdown. This was a cyber-attack, or rather a chain of attacks. Like pretty much everything else in 2026, supermarket freezers are digitally enabled. That makes them smarter and more efficient, but like everything else that is connected to the internet, it also makes them more vulnerable.
Russian hacktivists claimed they were behind some of the supermarket sabotage, but no one knows for sure. It could also be Iran, Iranian proxies, North Korea – or unaffiliated bedroom hackers. When Transport for London suffered a devastating hack two years ago, the culprits turned out to be two British teenagers . Governments regularly warn retailers and other companies about cyber-attacks and even provide cyber-defence training to businesses . The lessons of costly ransomware and cyber-attacks also mean many big organisations and retailers have become much better at keeping their payments and logistics systems safe.
More from the original report
But freezers present a new vulnerability. In Sweden, for example, some of the stores that were attacked this week hadn’t connected their freezers to national retailers’ systems, which have centralised protection. Now they’ve learned their lesson the hard way.
Hybrid warfare – or, to use the defence term, greyzone aggression – refers to an array of hostile acts by a country’s adversaries that fall short of full-on military conflict. Cyber-hackers also this week attempted to meddle with fridges at French blood banks, while hoax bomb threats forced commercial airliners across Europe to divert, make emergency landings or require fighter jet escort to safety.
This comes after at least two years of sporadic Kremlin-suspected arson attacks on factories, explosives-laden drones flown into airports and drone incursions into countries’ airspace. There is constant GPS interference in the skies around…