European Commission Vice-President Henna Virkkunen warned that recent cyber attacks on supermarkets and blood banks should serve as a warning for Europe to protect essential infrastructure from unacceptable risks.
© Goncalo Fonseca/Bloomberg via Getty Images
11/11/2026
by
Lusa
A vice-President of the European Commission responsible for security, Henna Virkkunen, today argued that recent cyber attacks on supermarkets and blood banks “should serve as a warning” for Europe to protect essential infrastructure from “acceptable risks”.
In a debate on hybrid threats in the European Parliament today, Virkkunen stressed that the cost of these hybrid attacks was “not only financial but also social”.
“ Although the attacks did not have a significant impact on food security or public health, they should serve as a warning to everyone: Europe cannot afford to have strategic dependencies or weaknesses that expose our critical infrastructure to unacceptable risks,” said Virkkunen.
The Vice-President of the Community Executive insisted on the importance of preventing “risks of foreign interference, spying or interruption” in the supply chains of the most essential information and communication technologies (ICTs) and pointed out in particular infrastructure such as 5G networks, increasingly present in functions such as ultra-fast connectivity, data transmission or drone detection.
“ We need a firm, pragmatic and proportional approach to reduce risks in our essential ICT supply chains, and we must now act to reduce risks in our 5G networks. Time for hesitation is over. We need to be much more decisive and ambitious, including setting clear deadlines for the gradual elimination of high-risk suppliers,” she said.
The Finnish Commissioner stressed that if it is not possible to eliminate high-risk suppliers from 5G networks, these dependencies will eventually be transferred to the future of connectivity with 6G.
“ Cyber-resistance is not only to prevent attacks, but to ensure that our societies, economies and defensive capabilities can continue to function during a crisis. The risk of disruption of critical EU (EU) infrastructure by foreign actors is real,” he warned.
Virkkunen indicated that the EU already has directives that “could have avoided” some of these incidents, if they were fully implemented, and said that devices such as recently affected industrial refrigerators “are unnecessarily exposed to the Internet or configured with old software or weak passwords”.