Subscribe
The “Internet of things” has become a security liability to Europe. Perhaps now, after hundreds of millions of euros of spoiled frozen food, will the warnings about overreliance on technology be heeded?
The large-scale sabotage of freezer units across the EU has garnered much media attention these past few weeks, with the first targeted attack occurring in France on the 12th of October. On the 2nd of November, a wave of commercial freezer units across several different countries were manipulated in a similar manner. The temperatures which were supposed to be well below freezing were turned up to 50 degrees or more. The cost of the millions of tons wasted food products is second to the concern that quickly spread across Europe – how vulnerable is our modern way of life to hackers?
Because indeed, this was not a chain of burglaries into convenience stores and supermarkets, this was a coordinated digital attack that took advantage of the freezer units’ cyber connectivity. It was hardly a matter of conventional hacking either, but merely a log-in screen on a system management webpage with what one can assume to have been credentials that were easy to figure out. Subsequently, the perpetrators gained remote access to the cooling system of hundreds of freezers. The culprits announced themselves as a group that has been described as pro-Russian, and the incident has therefore been viewed as an act of hybrid warfare designed to erode societal trust and spread anxiety in Western Europe.
The alleged Russian connection is what put this incident on the map, and was the pretext for governments and intelligence agencies to become deeply involved in the event. But the incident itself is highly interesting regardless of who did it or for what purpose, because it exposed a crucial vulnerability in the modern, and perhaps in particular the Western, lifestyle. Why does a freezer need to be connected to the Internet?
The push to digitise has gone too far
For probably decades, governments and organisations in Europe have been encouraging digitisation, and countless projects have been dedicated to increasing the digital competency of the population and to build out digital infrastructure. Analogue solutions have been declared obsolete, knobs and buttons have been replaced by touch screens, and even something as banal as a door lock has been turned into a software. For a while it was a practical development with clear economical, technical and even social benefits.
But at some point this computer hype probably lost its charm. Now in some countries that are particularly far-gone, such as Sweden, we are debating the drawbacks of having replaced pens, papers, and books with surf tablets in schools. The entire world got to experience the disadvantages of replacing real-life meetings, even school lessons, with Zoom conference calls during the pandemic. Suffice to say there are valid reasons to scale back this development, as the public and private sector both are realising that it’s a terrible idea for the human psyche and long-term productivity (just look at the global decline in the PISA studies) to be isolated from peers and be constantly glued to a screen.
This problem is adjacent to the phenomenon of over-exposure to the Internet among children, which is caused by smartphones being so normalised in a modern society. There has simply never been any serious pushback against this increasing reliance on connectivity and screens, and those movements that existed through the 2000s were derided as reactionary and anti-technology. Instead, connectivity and accessibility have been uncritically lauded as universal virtues in innovation, and goes for both hardware and software. The so-called “Internet of things”, where trivial appliances in everyday life are constantly communicating with a server somewhere, exchanging user data for patches and updates.
There were probably a lot of people chuckling at the idea of a fridge being connected to the Internet whatever number of years ago when the first such products were launched. Now we know what a truly ridiculous idea it was. All it took for the integrity of millions of people and thousands of businesses to be challenged was a worsened relation between Europe and other parts of the world where there are highly unscrupulous tech-savvy actors who were willing to utilise these vulnerabilities.
The great attack of European freezers in 2026 was a hell of the modern world’s own making. It bears the hallmark of what happens when careful conservatism is discarded in favour of unrelenting and naïve technological optimism. Clearly, the security philosophy behind many of these over-connected systems that now exist in domestic, commercial, and industrial contexts did also not account for the damage that bad actors with the commitment to crack a log-in screen could do. Some skeptics warned about the dangers of software-based vehicle steering a few years ago when such systems were first reaching the market. Today, concerns about vehicles being hacked by criminal organisations, terrorists, or hostile states should be at the forefront of the car industry.
The time to check the rear mirror
To propose something such as de-digitisation sounds impossible in today’s world. But it is arguably what must be done in order to protect not only ordinary people and businesses, but even governments, from looming disasters at the hands of spyware, viruses, or other malicious programmes.
The counter to such a claim would be that society simply needs to be better prepared for incidents such as the European freezer attack. This has been the formal advice to the public from governments, at least. Some experts invested in the digital world have been quick to point out outdated programme versions as the real problem, seemingly as if to cover up for the frivolous redundancy of freezers being connected to the Internet in the first place.
The case for increased digital awareness and competence weakens when one considers the logistics of how cyber-based threats develop. New methods to crack new security implementations are born quicker than said security patches are adapted, especially in civilian contexts where there is normally no need for advanced security. Such as food retail and cafés, as in the most recent example. Why should a shop owner be expected to keep their freezer’s software up to date? Or have to identify the flaws of the particular system of freezers he has procured for his business?
The number of highly knowledgeable IT experts in a country’s population is always going to be significantly lower than the number of people who are currently dependent on incessant connectivity in their professional and personal lives. It is simply too much to demand of citizens to be vigilant towards unexpected hacker attacks and keep their IT security in perfect order so as to not fall prey to the latest hypothetical threats.
Governments and experts should be recommending the public not to depend on items, be it appliances large or small, door locks, or vehicles that are connected to the Internet, unless they know very much what they are doing and what is expected of them. They should not be lecturing the public to educate themselves, when the threshold of knowledge to counter a professional hacker attack is almost unattainable to 99 percent of the population.
I am not proposing a complete de-digitisation of society. But to have backup plans, especially for vital services such as healthcare, emergency responding, and commerce. Governments would do well to advise citizens to be vigilant towards technological creep that they do not understand the implications of. Perhaps once a sound relationship to connectivity has taken root in the culture, we might just manage to avoid having to legislate against selling products with an unmotivated access to the Internet.