On today's chart 263K views since yesterday

Supermarket freezers switched to defrost in European cyber-attack

BBC News follows discarded food outside Brussels with a security question: why were vulnerable refrigeration systems still accessible online?

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BBC News Story of November 3, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? One of the most watched videos since yesterday, with 263,468 views.

Shop freezers in seven European countries hit by cyber-attack | BBC News

Things we can learn from the video

Press to jump

0:33Nick Beake shows defrosted supermarket food being discarded outside Brussels.
1:10The report explains how altered refrigeration settings raised temperatures in affected shops.
1:51Forescout's Daniel dos Santos warns of repeat attacks following the earlier incidents in France.
2:36Will Guyatt says thousands of refrigeration units remained exposed online after the vulnerability became known.
3:22Guyatt says a software fix has existed for over a year and suggests disconnecting equipment as an interim measure.
4:10Guyatt discusses AI's potential to identify vulnerabilities by analysing software code.

Frozen food goes into a skip outside Brussels, not into shoppers' baskets. BBC correspondent Nick Beake shows the physical cost of a cyber-attack that has reached supermarket refrigeration systems across seven European countries.

The BBC News report, uploaded today, has drawn about 260,000 views in its first eleven hours. It connects an unusually tangible consequence of hacking with a warning about equipment left exposed online.

Around forty Delhaize supermarkets in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected, alongside smaller numbers of shops in Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland, the BBC reports. Belgian refrigeration manufacturer Sabcobel says affected units' evaporators were switched into defrost mode, warming them up.

Swedish store manager Rickard Nilsson struggles to understand the purpose of the intrusion into temperature-monitoring systems. The report then turns to an earlier attack on French supermarkets, where local media reported that millions of euros' worth of food had to be discarded in October. Forescout's Daniel dos Santos warns that the pattern could recur.

In the studio discussion, LBC technology reporter Will Guyatt says thousands of units remained exposed online weeks after the vulnerability became known. His account makes the problem less about an unstoppable new technique than a failure to address an existing weakness: "Well, a software fix has been available for over a year."

Guyatt suggests disconnecting affected equipment from the internet as an interim measure. He also discusses AI's potential to uncover software flaws, but the immediate question in this report is what happened to a fix that already existed.

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