ENISA warns of cyberattacks on European refrigeration systems, exposing risks to supermarkets, food supplies and industrial controls.

The European Union has issued a coordinated cybersecurity warning after a series of attacks hit commercial refrigeration systems in several Member States. The incidents, which began in October and continued with a new wave on November 1 and 2, have raised concerns about the security of equipment that plays an essential role in food distribution and other critical operations.

In a joint statement published on November 4, ENISA, the European Commission, Europol and European cybersecurity coordination bodies urged organisations to take immediate steps to protect vulnerable systems.

“Following a new wave of incidents having occurred on 1-2 November, ENISA, the European Commission (DG CNECT), Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), the Network of the EU national computer security incident response teams (EU CSIRTs Network) and the European cyber crisis liaison organisation Network (EU- CyCLONe), advise organisations to take immediate action to mitigate exposure in the affected systems.” reads the advisory.

The warning highlights the need for “immediate action to mitigate exposure”, as attackers continue to target systems that are often overlooked in traditional cybersecurity strategies.

The attacks have already had tangible consequences. In France, hackers targeted refrigeration management systems used by hundreds of supermarkets, remotely changing their settings and forcing freezers into continuous defrost mode. Some systems reportedly reached temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius, destroying large quantities of fresh and frozen food. According to reports, around 300 Intermarché and Netto stores and fewer than 100 Coopérative U outlets were affected. Other retailers also reported disruptions to their cooling equipment.

The French incidents also exposed a broader problem: the security of industrial control systems that manage physical processes. These systems are increasingly connected to corporate networks and remotely accessible, but they don’t always receive the same security attention as traditional IT infrastructure.

BFMTV revealed the attackers targeted equipment from the Danish maker Danfoss that many French stores use to regulate their cold. Fresh and frozen stock was destroyed, and the Paris prosecutor says there were also fires.

Targeted devices were older Danfoss refrigeration controllers that had reached the end of their support life and no longer received security updates. Other systems were running outdated firmware. Researchers had previously identified vulnerabilities in some Danfoss controllers, including weaknesses that could allow attackers to bypass authentication. However, authorities haven’t confirmed whether those specific flaws were exploited in the attacks.

The European response reflects the fact that these incidents aren’t isolated technical problems. ENISA says national cybersecurity teams and EU crisis management authorities are sharing information and coordinating their investigations. The agencies also stress the importance of “rapid information-sharing” and a coordinated response to understand the scale of the campaign and help affected organisations.

ENISA has also published a collection of technical advisories from national CSIRTs to help organisations identify the risks and apply appropriate protective measures. These recommendations are particularly relevant to companies operating refrigeration equipment, supermarkets, food distribution networks and other facilities that depend on industrial control systems.

The statement also draws attention to existing European cybersecurity legislation. Since September 11, 2026, manufacturers of hardware and software products have been required to report severe incidents and actively exploited vulnerabilities through the Cyber Resilience Act’s Single Reporting Platform. The main cybersecurity requirements of the CRA will apply from December 11, 2027, requiring manufacturers to adopt security-by-design principles and provide security support throughout the product lifecycle, including timely vulnerability fixes.

The NIS2 Directive also requires organisations within its scope to manage cybersecurity risks affecting their operations and report significant incidents to their national CSIRT or competent authority. ENISA is supporting these efforts through its Secure by Design and Default Playbook, technical advisories and initiatives aimed at improving product security across the European market.

The refrigeration attacks are a reminder that cybersecurity failures can have consequences well beyond data theft or temporary IT outages. Manipulating an industrial controller can destroy food stocks, disrupt business operations and potentially affect services that people depend on every day. Organisations must therefore treat the security of operational technology as a core part of their risk management strategy, rather than an issue to address only after an incident.

“The main cybersecurity requirements laid down in the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) will apply as of 11 December 2027. Manufacturers of hardware and software products (‘products with digital elements’) will be required to implement security-by-design and ensure security support during the lifecycle of such products, including the remediation of vulnerabilities without delay.” concludes the Agency’s advisory. “In addition, entities to which the NIS2 Directive (Directive (EU) 2022/2555) applies must implement measures to manage the cybersecurity risks to their operations, and report significant incidents to their national CSIRT or authority. Furthermore, ENISA is actively contributing to strengthening cybersecurity across the EU by promoting secure-by-design and secure-by-default principles in the EU market.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, refrigeration systems)

Frontier AI is compressing the attack lifecycle from vulnerability discovery to exploitation, forcing defenders to detect, patch and respond at machine speed.

Cybersecurity has always been a race between attackers and defenders. ENISA’s latest assessment suggests that frontier AI is changing the speed of that race, and the gap between discovering a vulnerability and exploiting it could soon become measured in minutes rather than months.

In its July 2026 paper, ENISA’s view on Cybersecurity in the Frontier AI Era, the EU cybersecurity agency argues that advanced AI is compressing parts of the attack chain, from reconnaissance and vulnerability discovery to exploitation, lateral movement and data theft. The problem isn’t simply that AI can find more bugs. It’s that it can connect individual findings into a working attack.

That distinction is important. Traditional security operations could often rely on the time required for a human attacker to research a target, understand a vulnerability, develop an exploit and deploy it. ENISA says that “grace period” is disappearing as automated systems take over more of the work.

The agency describes a particularly worrying possibility: what it calls “negative time-to-exploit”. In practice, attackers could gain access to usable exploit information before defenders have even received or deployed a fix. ENISA says vulnerability weaponisation may now occur within 15 minutes of disclosure, while research cited in its report puts the median time from initial access to data exfiltration at 72 minutes.

That puts traditional patch management under pressure. A company can receive a vulnerability advisory, send it through a change process, test the update, obtain approval and schedule deployment. An attacker does not have to follow any of those steps.

ENISA calls this an “Authority Gap”: organisations may simply take longer to approve a defensive action than an AI-assisted attacker needs to exploit the weakness. The uncomfortable question is whether some environments will eventually need autonomous or near-autonomous patching because waiting for human approval could become the greater risk.

That doesn’t mean companies should blindly automate every security update. Automated patching can break systems, disrupt critical services or introduce new bugs, and ENISA explicitly identifies verification of AI-generated patches as a new bottleneck. The challenge is therefore not automation versus humans, but deciding which decisions can safely happen at machine speed and which still require human approval.

The scale of vulnerability discovery could create another problem. ENISA reports that one organisation went from roughly 80 CVEs in the first quarter of 2025 to almost 500 in the first quarter of 2026, then saw the volume rise to about 500 reports per day when frontier-AI tools were used.

At that point, finding vulnerabilities is no longer the main bottleneck. Verification and remediation become the problem.

Security teams already know what happens when too many alerts arrive at once. The difference is that AI could produce them at a scale humans cannot review manually. ENISA therefore recommends shifting resources from discovery alone toward faster triage, prioritisation and remediation, using approaches such as EPSS and VEX to focus scarce resources on vulnerabilities that are most likely to matter.

There’s another issue that deserves more attention: low-severity vulnerabilities may become more dangerous when AI can chain them together. ENISA notes that frontier models can reason about application logic, credentials, configurations and API access rather than simply identify isolated coding flaws. That can turn several individually modest weaknesses into a practical attack path.

This changes how defenders should think about risk. A vulnerability that looks harmless in isolation may become useful when combined with a weak credential, an exposed API or a poorly configured service.

The same pressure is already affecting the disclosure process. ENISA says AI-generated vulnerability reports have begun to overwhelm parts of the open-source reporting pipeline, with platforms and maintainers struggling to separate useful findings from repetitive or poorly validated submissions. At the same time, the agency notes that the quality of AI-generated reports has improved, meaning the problem could become both more serious and harder to filter.

There is a similar shift on the defensive side. ENISA recommends integrating AI into the software development lifecycle, using continuous threat modelling and automated testing rather than treating security as a review performed at the end of development. It also argues for AI-assisted incident response that can validate telemetry, prioritise events and contain the blast radius while keeping human oversight in place.

That last condition matters. The answer to machine-speed attacks cannot simply be giving machines unlimited authority to fight back. Defensive AI needs its own controls, permissions and audit trails, especially when it can make changes to production systems.

ENISA also recommends an “assume-breached” approach. Organisations should expect that some attacker will eventually get inside and design segmentation, monitoring and access controls so that one compromised component doesn’t automatically become a route into everything else.

The agency sees this as a structural change rather than another temporary threat trend. It recommends machine-speed defence under the broader concept of “Cybersecurity as Code”, covering areas such as vulnerability management, incident response, security architecture and secure software development.

Europe also has a policy problem to solve. NIS2, the Cyber Resilience Act and the AI Act already provide parts of the framework, but ENISA argues that Europe should develop common benchmarks for testing advanced AI models in cyber ranges, measuring exploitability and simulating chained attacks.

The agency also sees value in European cybersecurity data. Incident reports, malware samples, vulnerability disclosures and threat intelligence could support trusted defensive AI models, provided organisations apply strong safeguards, anonymisation and access controls.

For companies, however, the message is much simpler than the policy language suggests. Review your asset inventory, understand which systems are exposed, identify unsupported components and measure whether your detection and response can keep up with an attack that moves in minutes rather than hours. ENISA explicitly recommends near-real-time security operations, with single-digit-minute targets for mean time to detect and respond.

The defenders who adapt fastest won’t necessarily be those with the most advanced AI model. They’ll be the ones that have already removed the basic obstacles: fragmented logging, excessive privileges, slow approvals, unknown assets and systems nobody wants to patch because nobody is quite sure what will break.

AI is making attacks faster. It doesn’t change the basic rules of cybersecurity.

It just makes the cost of ignoring them arrive much sooner.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Frontier AI)

ENISA has gained access to Anthropic’s Mythos 5, giving EU officials a chance to independently test the cyber AI after months of negotiations.

The post EU Gets Access to Anthropic Cyber AI — But Not Its Newest Model appeared first on TechRepublic.

Some of the world's leading democracies are pushing governments and companies to start preparing for post-quantum cryptography before quantum computers become powerful enough to break the encryption systems that protect global digital infrastructure today.

In a joint advisory released Thursday, the G7 Cybersecurity Working Group and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said organizations should begin their transition to post-quantum cryptography now, rather than waiting until cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) are available to threat actors.

Why the Post-Quantum Cryptography Shift Cannot Wait

The publication, titled "Preparing for the Post-Quantum Era: A Call to Action," warns that the quantum computing threat is no longer a distant concern. While the exact timeline for CRQC development remains uncertain, the working group said recent technological advances suggest such machines could emerge sooner than expected, putting widely used public-key cryptography mechanisms at risk.

One of the most immediate dangers is a tactic known as "harvest now, decrypt later," where malicious actors intercept and store encrypted data today with the intention of decrypting it once a CRQC becomes available. This poses a serious risk to governmental records, sensitive personal data, and trade or business secrets that require long-term confidentiality.

The advisory also cautions that CRQCs could eventually be used to target authentication mechanisms, allowing bad actors to impersonate trusted entities, forge data, or compromise equipment. Because supply chain vulnerabilities can cascade, a single organization's delay in adopting post-quantum cryptography could expose entire sectors to compromise.

According to the report, organizations that fail to act may also face business consequences beyond security risk, including exclusion from public procurement contracts and loss of competitive advantage.

Five Priorities for the PQC Transition

The G7 Cybersecurity Working Group outlined five priority areas to guide the global shift toward post-quantum cryptography:

1. Raising awareness — Many organizations still view the quantum threat as a distant or purely technical issue. The group called for awareness campaigns, technical guidance, and workforce upskilling to reframe it as an economic and business risk.
2. Developing national strategies — Countries are encouraged to build strategies that ensure an adequate supply of quantum-safe hardware and software while encouraging adoption, integrating the effort into broader digital privacy and security policies.
3. Advancing research and development — Governments should fund research programs and support pilot projects and testbeds to help organizations test and refine their transition to post-quantum cryptography.
4. Building public-private partnerships — Collaboration between government, industry, and academia is seen as key to developing domestic expertise, lowering transition costs, and sharing playbooks and case studies across sectors.
5. Integrating PQC into cybersecurity requirements — The group recommends treating post-quantum cryptography adoption as a natural evolution of cryptographic best practice, and embedding requirements into public procurement to push both vendors and organizations toward quantum-safe systems.

The advisory emphasizes that the shift to post-quantum cryptography cannot be solved by individual organizations in isolation. Instead, it calls for early engagement, coordinated planning, and informed decision-making across public and private sectors worldwide.

Tackling the risks that the impending quantum computing era poses to current cryptographic systems... requires a coordinated global effort to transition to PQC," the report states, adding that public and private organizations must act now to safeguard confidential data, supply chains, and critical systems.

The document was jointly published by cybersecurity authorities from Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France's ANSSI, with participation from the European Commission and support from the EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA).