SOMETIMES YOU JUST want to write a whimsical little column about fridges being hacked. 

Sure, you’d find some way to acknowledge that a fridge-hacking is serious business and speaks to the vulnerabilities inherent to “smartening” up all of our devices right down to our kitchen appliances, but mostly it would be quaint little jokes along the lines of “What will they hack next, our kettles?” And everyone can have a nice lighthearted time. 

That was the plan for this column at the start of the week, after SuperValu announced that 13 of its stores had been affected by a cyberattack that targeted their refrigeration systems. Obviously it’s not ideal for anyone who wanted to buy ice cream from any of those 13 SuperValu that day, but you know, no use crying over unrefrigerated milk and all that. 

But then you realise that this is the real world, and that the Great Fridge Hack of 2026 is actually probably part of a coordinated series of attacks to undermine the orderly functioning of society, terrify ordinary people and ultimately create conditions whereby we all have less trust in the institutions upon which we rely. Because nothing can ever be good craic for any longer than 30 seconds. You get 30 seconds of craic, and then you realise that the essential infrastructure of your country is under threat. 

As much as an online columnist might hope that SuperValu’s fridges were hacked as part of some kind of prank, alas, it seems to be an awful lot more serious than that.

That is, unless you also consider calling in bomb threats to multiple airlines a prank. It would probably be more accurately described as ‘an international security issue’, when you really think about it. Multiple flights carried by major airlines had to reroute, doubtlessly........

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