European greyzone aggression and cyber-sabotage of supermarket freezers and airline hoax threats, Digi Mart USA News: Supermarket freezers across Europe, from Finland to Ireland, suddenly began heating up, with many reaching 50C and food worth millions of euros having to be thrown away. The column describes this as a cyber-attack, or a chain of attacks, rather than a physical sabotage.
Russian hacktivists claimed responsibility for some of the supermarket sabotage, but no one knows for sure. The author notes that it could also be Iran, Iranian proxies, North Korea, or unaffiliated hackers.
Governments regularly warn retailers about cyber-attacks, and many large organisations have improved their protections, though freezers present a new vulnerability.
In Sweden, some of the stores attacked this week had not connected their freezers to national retailers’ systems, which have centralised protection. Cyber-hackers also 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 escorts.
The author places these incidents within a broader pattern of greyzone aggression, a term for hostile acts that fall short of full-on military conflict. These include suspected Kremlin-linked arson attacks on factories, explosives-laden drones flown into airports, drone incursions, constant GPS interference around the Baltic Sea, damage to subsea cables and pipelines, disinformation from bot farms, and repeated cyber-aggression.
Saboteurs usually aim both to disrupt and to destabilise societies by spreading fear. The author argues that the incidents have coincided with renewed European discussion about resilience, including the UK government’s Be Ready campaign, which launched last month and instructs people on stockpiling for emergencies caused by climate change or state-sponsored terrorism.
Similar campaigns exist elsewhere, including in earthquake-prone Tokyo and San Francisco. Sweden’s official booklet In Case of Crisis or War, distributed to every home since 2018, offers guidance on civil defence duties, volunteering, household supplies, and how to tell whether a crisis warning is real or a fake warning by bots.
The author has called for the UK to send a similar leaflet to households, having been told by officials that it would cause too much panic. A House of Lords committee heard in March that the bulk of the UK population is blissfully unaware of some of the risks they face.
Within a week of the Be Ready launch, the retailer Robert Dyas reported that weekly radio sales had risen by 160%, Maplin reported that radio sales had nearly doubled and power bank sales had more than doubled, and torch sales had nearly quadrupled.
The author concludes that the disruptions show the need to prepare for a wide range of threats, including power and water outages and disruption to food supply chains and internet connectivity. Iran’s obstruction of the Strait of Hormuz following US airstrikes was cited as having caused food inflation and oil and fertiliser shortages.
The author argues that preparing and demonstrating resilience can signal to Vladimir Putin and other rogue actors that disruption is futile.
