On Oct 11, a strange and alarming crisis unfolded across 700 French supermarkets when hackers infiltrated refrigeration systems and manipulated temperature settings.

Rather than cooling perishable food, the compromised controllers were forced into a 50C defrost mode, resulting in millions of euros in damaged food stocks.

Less than a month later, supermarkets in Italy, Germany, Romania, and the United Kingdom, as well as France's national blood service, Établissement Français du Sang, reported similar incidents involving the manipulation of cold-chain control systems.

The incidents raised concerns over how vulnerabilities in seemingly mundane infrastructure, such as refrigerators, could have real-world consequences for food safety and supply chains, including in countries thousands of kilometres away that depend on similar systems.