Hundreds of European supermarkets were forced to throw away food after hackers targeted their refrigeration systems, raising temperatures to as high as 50°C. More than 115 stores across at least seven European countries were affected. In Belgium, around 75 stores faced disruptions, including 40 Delhaize supermarkets. A Belgian butcher estimated that he lost nearly €15,000 worth of meat in a single day. Stores in Sweden, Ireland, Estonia, Luxembourg and Finland also reported attacks, while butcher shops and neighbourhood stores in the Netherlands faced refrigeration problems. Christophe Hansen, the European Union’s commissioner for agriculture, described the attacks as a “deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain”. The hackers had not been identified at the time of reporting. A similar incident affected more than 700 supermarkets across France in October, with losses running into millions of euros. In August, US authorities also began investigating refrigeration malfunctions at military bases and worked with French officials to examine whether the incidents were linked. But how were the supermarket refrigerators hacked? Supermarkets use central refrigeration control systems to monitor temperatures and regulate cooling across hundreds of refrigerators. These systems help maintain the required temperatures for frozen food, meat, dairy products and vegetables. According to the script, many of these systems ran on outdated software that no longer received security updates and were connected to the internet. After gaining access, hackers remotely changed the settings, raised temperatures to as high as 50°C and extended defrost cycles from one hour to eight hours. Defrost cycles are designed to warm refrigerators temporarily to remove accumulated ice. The hackers manipulated these cycles, keeping the systems warm for longer than intended and causing food to spoil.