It was a perfect example of the dangers of our interconnected world. A cyber attack on at least 400 French supermarkets has caused millions of dollars in damages – and should be raising questions for the rest of us.

My phone, computer and television are all connected to the internet. But there are so many other appliances and tools that I could connect. My car and stove first come to mind. If my fridge, washer and dryer were newer they would want to go online too.

It is so convenient to be able to connect with our homes remotely, to raise or lower the heat, to turn on aur conditioning, to start an appliance so food and drink will be ready when we get home. We don’t think about how those connections are vulnerable to bad actors.

Defrosting hundreds of store freezers and starting a few fires is the tip of the iceberg. What if it were to become more widespread? Wait, haven’t we looked at that already?

A decade ago American author Jeffrey Deaver explored the idea in The Steel Kiss, looking at the potential to turn our interconnected devices against us. It was a chilling read, and it is surprising to me that it has taken this long for fiction to become reality on a large scale.

No culprit has been identified in the French attack as I write this on Tuesday afternoon. My first thought when the news broke on Monday was that it was an example of artificial intelligence going rogue.

We have seen recently that AI agents are not always staying within their programing parameters. What is the difference between hacking into companies and looking around and hacking into refrigeration systems and turning them off? Or up? Probably nothing to AI.

I supposes it could be a cybercrime group flexing its muscles as a warning as to to what it could do, but that doesn’t make sense to me. A group like that would try first to extort money from the businesses it planned on attacking, and only destroy the refrigerated food if the companies failed to pay up.

How do we protect ourselves, as individuals and as a society, from more incidents like this one? Does anyone know?

It is easy to say we need tighter controls so that malicious people or AI chatbots can’t have unauthorized access to our homes and systems. Easy to say. Not easy to implement.

Two hundred years ago the Luddites in England resisted, sometimes violently, technological advances that they believed negatively impacted Britain’s working class. We don’t do that anymore – in my lifetime technological advances have been seen as beneficial, or benign at the worst. Do you wonder if that should still be the case?

Are we as individuals and as a society ready for a world in which freezers defrost unexpectedly, cars can be remotely stalled on the highway and the power grid can be shut off without human intervention? What is your response?

Those defrosting freezers in France are a warning to us all. Is anyone paying attention?