Still cold on the outside, already warm inside: the remote switch that turned supermarket freezers against their owners. AI-generated illustration.
Updated 8 November 2026.
In the night between 1 and 2 November, freezers in dozens of supermarkets in Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, Estonia, Ireland and the Netherlands were switched into defrost mode from a distance and reached 50 degrees Celsius. Three weeks earlier it had happened in France; the same night, in Sicily. A blood bank in France was targeted too, without consequences.
No malware was needed. The door was a controller nobody had updated and a remote access nobody had protected, in many cases with the factory password still in place. An Italian cybersecurity expert gave the cause a plain name: carelessness. In Europe it now also has a legal one.
The full article explains how a freezer gets hacked, why old and unpatched are two different problems, who was holding the keys, what NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act change, and why Brazil, exempt from the motive, is not exempt from the vulnerability. It closes with the questions to put in writing to whoever maintains your cold chain, before 4 a.m. answers them.