Hybrid threats and European vulnerability

The discourse of insecurity has been taking hold of Europe, even slipping into supermarket refrigerators. It is the idea of vulnerability brought to the ground zero of our daily lives. A dozen European Union countries have reported cyberattacks against the cooling systems of various supermarket chains that have caused millions in losses. The European Commissioner for Agriculture and Food, Christophe Hansen, even qualified the attacks as a “deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain“, and the French authorities accused, this Monday, directly Iran of being behind the manipulation that compromised the refrigerators of these large commercial surfaces.

But the traceability of threats is always complicated in these cases. Among the usual suspects, Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea are those that have most often targeted Europe with cyberattacks. But they are not the only ones, nor do they have to be state actors. The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) continues to point out, year after year, the prevalence of financial motivations behind more than 70% of these activities. Although they also highlight the growth of ideological motivation in digital disruption attempts within the European Union.

However, understanding disinformation and interference as a direct consequence of an external threat is limited and biased. The lines between internal and external actors are blurred. There is a nebula of groups creating or spreading disinformation and propaganda, as they are not geographically delimited or centrally organized. European investigations show that disinformation campaigns mainly depend on national resources.

In the same way, the qualifier hybrid, which accompanies these threats, reflects the diversity of forms and strategies they can adopt: from drones to cyberattacks, or from sabotage to disinformation. The European network of public media, coordinated by Eurovision and in which Televisió de Catalunya participates, has recently published the map with the dozens of hybrid incidents attributed to Russia recorded over the last year in the EU and verified by these media outlets. Among these episodes, the escalation of drone attacks in the Black Sea is included, which has repeatedly targeted commercial vessels off the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria, or the incident experienced on August 4th at the airport of the German city of Leipzig, when a drone loaded with an explosive device was discovered, which did not explode, near a parked plane that was transporting material to Ukraine.

The digital space is also, increasingly, a new front of dispute. Technology has multiplied the opportunities to identify specific audiences and the most efficient strategies to reach them. The possibilities are vast: from the amplification and algorithmic acceleration of messages that penetrate into the capillarity of society to the creation of virtual images designed for viralization. Their objective is to sow doubt, erode the belief in factuality, introduce contradictory narratives, polarize opinion, radicalize groups, and fuel actions that could disrupt or fragment a community. It is about identifying and exploiting pre-existing vulnerabilities and social fractures, amplifying digital violence, breaking into civil spaces, and destabilizing them.

The rise of hybrid threats marks a new chapter in European security. From cyberattacks on various blood banks in France, to false bomb threats on planes or at media headquarters, the goal is the same: to increase our awareness of vulnerability. It is about exploiting fear. But not only individual anxieties, rather fear as a landing strip for the policies of insecurity that have not stopped growing in recent years. Nothing is innocuous, especially ahead of an election year like the one facing Europe, with the far right hoping to emerge strengthened and with social unrest running through the streets of more than a dozen countries in the Union. More and more European leaders are speaking openly about the hybrid threat, from Friedrich Merz to Emmanuel Macron, Donald Tusk, or Pedro Sánchez. Each of them, however, does so based on their own vulnerabilities.