Opinion: Hot mess: France’s melted freezers hack can happen in Canada, too - The Globe and Mail

A food analytics expert says a cyberattack like the one that recently targeted grocery store chains in France is possible here. Some 700 food retailers in that country were struck earlier this week by hackers who remotely turned up the heat in thousands of coolers and freezers causing significant food losses – and even starting fires. Sylvain Charlebois of the Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University says similar cyberattacks have already occurred in this country, including one affecting Sobeys in 2022. “Most of our grocers have actually been cyberattacked already,” says Charlebois. He says Sobeys had to pay a ransom of $25 million at that time. “It is a real threat to our grocers and not just our grocers, but the entire food supply chain.”(VOCM News)Charlebois suspects that the incidents in France were precipitated by a ransom demand that the grocers refused to pay. He says grocers typically have a number of systems in place to protect their inventory, but there are still vulnerabilities.

Patients with a particular form of bowel cancer remained free of recurrence for almost three years after receiving a short course of immunotherapy before surgery, according to new findings from the NEOPRISM-CRC clinical trial led by researchers at UCL and UCLH. The results, which are due to be presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2026 in April, extend earlier findings from the trial. Those initial results showed that nine weeks of treatment with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab before surgery caused major tumor shrinkage in people with stage two or three bowel cancer.