BRUSSELS — The European Commission will assess how well supermarkets are prepared to handle cyberattacks after refrigerators in dozens of stores across at least six EU countries were taken offline.
EU Agriculture and Food Commissioner Christophe Hansen told POLITICO that the attacks would be discussed at the next meeting of its Security College to assess retailers’ contingency plans and their ability to respond to incidents.
“Europe’s food supply chain must be prepared for new and evolving threats,” Hansen said. “The repeated cyberattacks on supermarkets are deeply concerning, causing economic losses for retailers and empty shelves for consumers.”
The announcement follows dozens of supermarkets across Europe reporting disruptions to their refrigeration and freezing systems on Monday.
Incidents were reported in at least six EU countries — Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands and Estonia — with some retailers reporting that refrigerator temperatures had suddenly surged to as high as 50 degrees Celsius.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen set up the Commission’s Security College in March 2025 to discuss strategic developments and threats to the EU’s internal and external security.
The Security College format lets commissioners examine attacks beyond their immediate impact on retailers. It also places the disruptions in the broader context of Europe’s vulnerability to hybrid warfare, where attacks on essential supply chains can be used to undermine public confidence.
The Security College meets periodically, separately from the Commission’s regular weekly meetings. On Friday, the Security College discussed the timing of its next meeting, but no date has been set, although heads of cabinet attending the planning meeting agreed it should take place soon, according to an EU official granted anonymity to discuss the behind-closed-door gathering.
The Security College is chaired by von der Leyen and attended by all her commissioners.
The latest disruptions follow a series of cyberattacks in France in October, when hackers appeared to remotely manipulate refrigeration systems by activating their defrosting mechanisms, causing temperatures to rise sharply and food to spoil.
In October, Commission agriculture officials met retailers affected by cyberattacks to take stock of the situation as part of the EU’s food security contingency and preparedness efforts. “We must work at every level to strengthen our preparedness and resilience,” Hansen said.
The commissioner stressed that Europe’s food security is not at risk, but warned that these incidents exposed vulnerabilities in the food supply chain, with consequences for businesses, food waste and consumer confidence.
“These are a deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain and undermine consumers’ confidence in it — a warning that we must take seriously,” Hansen said.
BERLIN — Europe risks falling into a “complete trap” if it focuses on industrial AI while leaving frontier models to the U.S. and China, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said in an interview Monday.
On the sidelines of the Digital Summit in Berlin, Mensch said Europe needs to build its own computing capacity and advanced AI models to ensure security. He added that Europe cannot assume it will always have access to the most powerful foreign models, pointing to the risk that the U.S. and China could deploy export controls on AI.
“The idea that we can build anything meaningful without owning the foundation of it, which are the reasoning models, the brains that can operate the factories, that can help design better systems … is, I think, a complete trap,” he said. “And we’re lucky that people realize this now, that this is not a viable way.”
In recent weeks, Mensch has emerged as a leading voice against European leaders’ shift away from building frontier AI models. In September, top EU leaders advocated building applications on foreign models to reap the benefits, instead of chasing frontier models.
His comments came as the German government unveiled plans on Monday to make Germany a “sovereign AI nation” by 2030. While industrial AI is one of the strategy’s main bets, it also calls for Germany to help build at least three European frontier AI labs by that date.
Mensch welcomed Germany’s ambition, but warned the challenge cannot be tackled at the national level alone. “There is no such thing as a national strategy on AI,” he said. “It needs to be a European strategy on AI.”
Europe’s problem isn’t a lack of talent, he argued, but a “balance sheet problem”: the continent needs the capital and computing power to train sophisticated models and build companies that can compete at scale.
The European Union’s 27 leaders will have their first dedicated conversation on AI next week at an informal meeting in Dublin.
Mistral itself is betting heavily on industrial AI. Mensch pointed to his company’s partnerships with Airbus and ASML and said manufacturing is the French company’s biggest market, with applications ranging from designing aircraft to reducing machine downtime.
But industrial applications cannot make Europe technologically independent if others control the models and computing infrastructure behind them, Mensch said.
Building European alternatives, however, poses another challenge: convincing customers to use them when cheaper Chinese models can match or outperform their European rivals.
That tension has already surfaced for Mistral. German search engine Ecosia stopped using its models after concluding they did not meet its needs. Its CEO said that switching to Chinese models cut costs by half while improving overall performance.
Asked whether companies could be expected to compromise on price or performance for the sake of sovereignty, Mensch rejected the premise.
“There’s no such thing as a compromise in between competitiveness and quality and sovereignty,” he said.
Mensch did not directly address Ecosia’s experience. Instead, he argued that Mistral doesn’t need to lead on every benchmark, pointing to areas such as cybersecurity and geospatial imaging where he said its new Large 4 model outperforms Chinese open-weight rivals.
He said Mistral deliberately focused on areas where it saw strong demand.
“The quality of our technology finds a market everywhere outside of Europe, including in the U.S.,” he said. “Mistral Large 4 was a long-awaited release. It puts us very much back in the race.”
BRUSSELS — Refrigerators in dozens of supermarkets in at least five EU countries were out of service on Monday, local news outlets reported, in what appears to be a repeat of cyberattacks that hit French stores last month.
As of Monday afternoon, there were news reports of incidents affecting supermarkets in Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands and Estonia.
Several store managers told local media that refrigerator temperatures suddenly spiked to up to 50 degrees Celsius. This mirrors the French incidents last month, in which attackers appeared to remotely manipulate the fridges’ defrosting mechanisms so that they overheated.
It’s not confirmed that the attacks are connected or used the same software vulnerabilities that hit French chains, though one supermarket spokesperson said the incident is a cyberattack “similar to the one in France.”
Ken Munro, a cybersecurity researcher, said in an interview that supermarkets should have disconnected their refrigerators and the devices used to monitor and remotely manage them from the Internet. “I don’t accept any other excuse … particularly in light of the earlier [attacks in France],” he said.
Inti De Ceukelaire, another cyber researcher, also said the incident suggests supermarkets did not take the necessary steps even after the France attacks. “It seems that some of them simply did not get patched, which is quite ridiculous,” he said.
Belgian media reported on Monday morning that temperatures in supermarket refrigerators had suddenly spiked, forcing them to throw food away. A spokesperson for the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium said the agency is “closely” following the incident, adding that the attackers are unknown and that it “may never be possible to identify them.”
John Billow, director of Sweden’s National Cyber Security Centre, told POLITICO that there are “similarities” to the French incidents and that the agency is in touch with affected organizations. A European Commission spokesperson said it’s aware of the incidents and is using the EU-Cyclone network to coordinate and share information.
French supermarkets were hit with a wave of similar incidents in mid-October, when attackers targeted refrigerators by Danfoss, a Danish manufacturer of store fridges. Danfoss did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The attacks in France triggered a response from the country’s prime minister and its cybersecurity agency.
Belgian supermarket chain Delhaize alerted its store managers early on Monday morning of problems with refrigerators, and Belgian broadcaster RTBF cited a store manager as saying that the problems were due to a cyberattack like those in France.
A spokesperson for the company said it is aware of an “IT incident affecting the refrigeration systems in a number of Delhaize stores.” A spokesperson for Colruyt, which operates Spar stores in Belgium, said in a statement that fridges in “around five” Spar stores have been affected. “We are currently doing everything we can to resolve the issue,” they said, adding that no Colruyt stores have been affected.
A Carrefour spokesperson confirmed that 15 of its 700 stores have been affected, and that none of its larger “hypermarket” stores are among them. All stores remain open, they said.
Stores in Sweden have also been hit. A spokesperson for supermarket chain ICA confirmed an “incident overnight affecting a small number of ICA stores operating outside ICA’s central network” which affected its fridges and freezers.
A Coop spokesperson said seven of its 800 stores were affected but the situation, which is “contained and under control.” In one case, a refrigeration system began to generate heat, they said. Last month in France, the attacks caused at least one fire.
Like the public authorities, cyber researchers are looking for signs of who may be responsible. The fact that the attacks have happened again is evidence to suggest a hostile nation could be behind the attacks rather than young hacker pranksters, De Ceukelaire said. Munro, however, said he believes a “copycat” is behind Monday’s attacks.
“This won’t be the end of it,” Munro added. “There will be more.”
This article has been updated.
The exposure was immense, with AI multiplying the risks — and yet time-tested global cybersecurity procedures appeared to be functioning. Then suddenly, it all broke down.
The decision by a cybersecurity company on Wednesday to prematurely release information about a flaw in the popular PHP computer programming language left much of the web exposed to hackers, triggering a panic that brought to life months of warnings of how the AI-powered era could cause widespread damage.
The flaws in PHP, discovered using AI tools through a months-long process coordinated by OpenAI, caused cyber agencies across Europe, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and Canada to post urgent warnings Wednesday. Numerous governments took websites offline as a precaution.
While no major hacking damage was immediately apparent, the way the incident unfolded over 72 hours showed how easily cybersecurity processes can break down and the outsized consequences of cyber risks in the AI era.
The man who set off the chain reaction with the early release — Chainguard’s CEO Dan Lorenc — quickly apologized in a LinkedIn post. But on Thursday, in an interview with POLITICO, Lorenc said he’d shared the information ahead of time because the flaw was already being exploited. Though others disputed that, Lorenc said he believed he’d seen enough evidence to invalidate an embargo set up to allow time to find a fix for the flaws.
While he disputed that his actions would have caused problems for other defenders, Lorenc conceded that the evidential threshold in these coordinated cyber defense systems is a “grey area.”
The revelation of the PHP flaw brings out into the open what cyber officials have been bracing for since the arrival of the most powerful tools of artificial intelligence, which not only can be used to discover vulnerabilities but also to exploit them at scale.
The cybersecurity world’s long-established protocols helped prevent disaster scenarios, in which hackers would have successfully exploited the vulnerabilities to take control of numerous websites and access their data. But now the scale and end-of-days potential of AI-driven cyber risks are visible for the world to see.
This “is what happens when AI turns up a flaw that’s been hiding for years,” said Eylam Milner, co-founder and chief technology officer at cybersecurity start-up Echo. The vulnerabilities, he added, are “about as serious as it gets for the web.”
Understanding how this week’s emergency unfolded offers a glimpse at how companies and authorities are working to stave off attacks — and how much risk they face going forward.
The origins of the incident can be traced back as far as April when top frontier AI firm Anthropic unveiled Mythos, leading some in the cybersecurity world to worry that systems would quickly be overrun by advanced artificial intelligence, with potential for catastrophic events to ensue.
But while researchers did find more flaws in computer systems in the months after Anthropic and other AI firms like OpenAI released those models, they had little impact in the real world. Even the Hugging Face incident, a widely discussed hack that saw OpenAI’s autonomous AI agents go rogue during an internal security evaluation, related more to the level of control AI companies exert over their models than their power to break into systems worldwide.
That changed this week after researchers unveiled the vulnerability in PHP, a coding language estimated to be integrated into some 70% of the web.
The process by which information about flaws is released among cybersecurity officials and affiliated companies is crucial. Through a longstanding practice known as coordinated disclosure, researchers and companies that identify flaws can find a fix and share it confidentially with agencies and others before releasing to the public, meaning they don’t hand malicious hackers the gift of a hole without a fix.
In the case of the PHP flaw, that process worked well, but not perfectly. Information about the bugs started to circulate ahead of the planned release time. Then, according to the PHP Foundation, Chainguard “unilaterally broke the embargo,” which “disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.” PHP Foundation executive director Elizabeth Barron told POLITICO by email that while it was “disappointed” with Chainguard, it hopes to “rebuild trust with them in the future to ensure we can continue to collaborate effectively.”
After the leak— which meant information about the bugs was in the open before the fix was ready — confusion quickly ensued, with government bodies and private companies choosing to temporarily shut down their websites rather than risk potentially damaging breaches to their data and the sites themselves.
Early Thursday, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, an internet services company that is widely used by websites to block cyberattacks, giving it a high level of visibility over what hackers are doing, said in a post on X that it had seen “millions” of attempts to exploit the flaw.
Cloudflare saw thousands in the 10 hours before the flaw was publicly announced, then tens of thousands in the 45 minutes after the announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and now millions, Prince said.
Amazon’s cloud division also said the flaw is “now being broadly exploited in the wild.”
One senior U.S. government cyber official said that federal authorities have been overwhelmed — and not just by PHP. The same day the world was racing to address PHP, they were also dealing with bugs in node.js, a widely used JavaScript framework, Fortinet, GitHub and Oracle.
“The fire department is fighting multiple fires at once,” the official said, adding: “The good news is they’re all one-story structures on fire, which the fire department deals with all day, every day.”
Dauntingly, OpenAI said there’s more on the way. “These bugs are among several significant vulnerabilities we’ve already found and are working to fix, and we expect similar findings to increase sharply in the coming months,” the company said Wednesday in a statement.
Matthijs van Amelsfort, head of the Dutch cybersecurity agency, said in an interview that the job of keeping computer systems safe has been transformed by the advancement of AI. “As soon as the frontier models came out, that’s exactly what we said, this will be the trend,” he said. “And actually that’s happening now.”
Thomas Caspers, vice president of Germany’s cyber agency BSI, concurred: “We expect that [to be] happening more and more during the coming months.”
AI also ramps up the risks once the flaws are out in the open. Cyber agencies’ recommendation that organizations take their websites offline was “really a drastic measure,” Caspers said. “We wouldn’t have done that a few years ago or so.” But because AI has made it quicker and easier to exploit flaws, “we had to do that,” he said.
At the same time, the use of advanced AI to detect the flaws may create a new level of protection against malicious hackers looking to take advantage of them. Caspers said that though his German agency has also seen attacks, it has not seen any successful use of the flaw by hackers.
“It seems a little bit more complicated than expected to exploit,” he said.
Despite the fact that AI offers a new way to discover flaws, the work involved in keeping systems protected is more quotidian, with cyber agencies urging organizations to install the fix shared by the PHP Foundation, in a process known as patching.
“There are three things that you have to do right now,” said van Amelsfort from the Dutch agency. “And that’s patch, patch, and patch.”
John Sakellariadis contributed to this report.
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
Are we living through “Black October”? Maybe, according to cybersecurity experts who are raising the alarm about AI’s increasingly sophisticated and far-reaching hacking abilities.
This week alone has seen a string of alarming incidents where AI uncovered previously unknown security flaws deep in the infrastructure of the internet. The most concerning involves something called PHP — a programming language that, according to The Atlantic, is used by “as much as 70 percent of websites.” Cybersecurity researchers used AI to locate a major security breach in the technology.
It’s the kind of thing that, when it’s working, is practically invisible. When it stops, though, you really notice it: Government websites in the UK and Europe briefly went down earlier this week after the PHP vulnerability was discovered, as did some sites in the Wikipedia family, the Internet Archive, and many others.
The outages weren’t actually the result of a hack, but rather preventative action as web engineers took sites down to fix the vulnerability before it was exploited. But not every PHP-like issue will necessarily be uncovered before it can be exploited by someone using AI tools less ethically, and older websites relying on PHP might go unpatched.
The problem doesn’t stop there, either: Concern is also rising around AI cybersecurity risks to ubiquitous conveniences like online banking. As Axios reported on Thursday, banks are detecting more and more “unauthorized third-party AI agents” operating inside of their systems.
Those agents are mostly unauthorized by the banks, Axios explains — the holders of the bank account might have given them permission — but it still creates a security risk that executives described as “horrifying,” in part because banks can’t necessarily tell if an agent doesn’t have permission.
It’s a lot to take in, all of it moving extremely quickly, and it’s hard to tell what any of us can do about it as AI labs continue to forge ahead with ever more competent AI models and agents. Luckily, my colleague Adam Clark Estes has some simple recommendations to shore up your own cybersecurity.
One problem with hackers — even those that happen to be AI agents — is that they can be unpredictable. You won’t know to, say, lock down your Quest Diagnostics records before a breach happens. But whenever you find yourself wondering if your data is safe, that’s a good time to double check that you’ve at least covered your bases.
The National Cybersecurity Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to the safe use of technology, maintains a list of basic online safety practices that everyone should follow. In no particular order, here’s what to pay attention to now:
Taking all these measures is not a one-time affair. You have to be vigilant in keeping yourself safe online. Security experts have a term for this that’s almost too specific: cyber hygiene. Like brushing your teeth or taking a shower, take good care of your online life, and do it often.
➨ Is it still possible to ban gerrymandering? The current US Supreme Court is very, very hostile to getting politics out of congressional map-making. But if Democrats win back power, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. My colleague Ian Millhiser gamed out how they could do it in a way that survives the Court — as well as some approaches that almost certainly wouldn’t fly. But, he writes, the real trick will be finding a solution that functions the way Congress wants it to and can’t be exploited by mapmakers.
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