19/11/2025
Imagine a scorching summer day in Paris when rising temperatures overload a data center’s cooling system, knocking it offline. Or recall Spain’s massive grid failure on April 28, 2025, when an unexplained surge in voltage “caused a gridlock in cities” and left “tens of thousands stranded on trains overnight or stuck in lifts.”
Such climate-driven disruptions are no longer science fiction. Heatwaves, storms, and droughts are now triggering outages and equipment failures that cascade into the digital realm, turning weather into a security catalyst. At the same time, innovations in biotechnology and wearable/implantable devices are blurring the line between our bodies and data networks.
A New Era of Cyber Threats
In short, the next frontier of cyber threats lies at the intersection of environment, technology, and the human body. Emerging experts even call this convergence “cyberbiosecurity”: a new field at the nexus of cybersecurity and biosecurity.
In the EU context, regulators are taking notice. Heatwaves that broke records in 2022 not only drove up energy demand but also caused “electricity blackouts in multiple cities” as grids were pushed beyond their limits. Meanwhile, Europe’s bold push for digital health (e‑prescriptions, telemedicine, smart wearables) has created millions of new cyber-physical endpoints – each one a potential entry point for hackers.
In this article, we describe real incidents (like data-center failures and medical device hacks), review EU-specific drivers (climate trends, regulations, grid stress), and outline an integrated strategy for leaders in energy, sustainability, healthcare, and IT. The message is clear: Data, electricity, and people are now inseparable, and protecting them requires a holistic, forward-looking approach.
Climate as a Security Factor
Climate change is already stressing Europe’s energy and IT systems in unprecedented ways. Record heat and drought in 2022 made Europe “the fastest warming continent” and drove energy use to new highs.
Intense heat waves raised demand for air conditioning even as they reduced power output (e.g., by lowering hydro reservoirs or causing thermal plants to trip). The World Meteorological Organization notes that “more extreme weather – including intense heat, heavy precipitation and droughts – have growing implications for the supply, demand and infrastructure of Europe’s energy system.”
In practice, this means overloaded power lines, transformer failures and forced brownouts during heat events. During a mid-2022 heatwave in southern Europe, falling river levels cut hydropower in Italy, and a surge in electricity use “pushed electricity grids beyond their limits, leading to blackouts in multiple cities.”. Even data centers are vulnerable. A London data center serving Google and Oracle went offline in a recent heatwave when its cooling systems failed. Alarmingly, an industry survey found 45% of data centers have already experienced an extreme-weather event threatening continuous operation, and nearly 9% suffered an outage from it.
Increasing Grid Fragility
The result is growing grid fragility. Europe’s electrical transmission networks are under “growing stress.” With renewables adding variability and demand rising from the electrification of heat and transport, grid congestion is “becoming more frequent.”
High temperatures compound this: Lines sag on hot days and have less headroom, forcing generators off-peak. Utilities are increasingly relying on real-time weather data (dynamic line ratings) to maximize throughput, but this is a temporary fix. Without new infrastructure and smarter controls, critical facilities face blackouts. For example, the April 2025 Iberian blackout was blamed on a combination of voltage control failures and a lack of reactive power support from some thermal plants.
In response, EU regulators are taking action. The new Critical Entities Resilience (CER) Directive explicitly requires essential energy and infrastructure companies to include “disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation measures” in their resilience plans. Similarly, the pending NIS2 cybersecurity rules urge member states to coordinate cross-sector risk management, implicitly covering extreme weather.
Building Energy Resilience
What can organizations do? A key lesson is to build energy independence. One approach is microgrids and islanding: Local generation (solar, wind, batteries, backup gas) coupled with smart controls that automatically separate (“island”) the site from the wider grid during emergencies. Modern microgrids can “automatically ‘island’ from the main grid, keeping critical facilities powered” with split-second switching.
For instance, data centers can deploy on-site solar-plus-storage or fuel cells so they ride through a city blackout. Likewise, hospitals and industrial plants can use localized generation to stay online when the grid fails. Getronics helps clients design such resilient power architectures. Equally important is advanced cooling and monitoring: active energy management (sensors, OT/IT integration) can cut waste and alert operators before overload. Deploying real-time energy dashboards has enabled industrial clients to slash electricity use by ~25%, easing strain on both budget and grid.
Humans as Bio-Digital Attack Points
Just as the weather is becoming a vector of tech risk, so too is the human body in the age of biotechnology. Medical and wearable devices create a “bio-digital” frontier where cyber attackers can harm people’s health or steal intimate data. Researchers have even coined the term cyberbiosecurity to describe threats “at the interface of the life sciences and digital worlds.”.
The proliferation of implants, sensors, and brain interfaces means that hacking can directly influence human biology. For example, smart insulin pumps and pacemakers are effectively computers in people’s bodies. Security researchers demonstrated that a remote attack could cause a pump to overdose a patient or a pacemaker to induce fatal heart rhythms.
It’s Not Science Fiction
These scenarios may sound like sci-fi, but they are real enough to worry regulators: Following public exploits (an insulin pump hack at Black Hat 2011, a pacemaker hack at DEF CON 2012), the U.S. FDA and manufacturers updated guidance, and by 2017 the first pacemaker recalls were issued due to cybersecurity vulnerabilities. In October 2018, Medtronic even preemptively shut down a remote monitoring system when researchers revealed that data signals could be manipulated.
Even non-medical wearables pose risks. Fitness trackers and smartwatches collect sensitive health metrics and location data; in 2021, over 61 million records from devices like Fitbits and Apple Watches were exposed on misconfigured servers. (The leaked data included heart rates, weight, age and GPS-based workout locations.)
What’s on the horizon is even more concerning. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and neurotech, once experimental, are coming closer to everyday use. Imagine a world where your thoughts power a device. That’s both exciting and terrifying. A recent analysis warns that hacking a BCI could allow an attacker to read or even manipulate your brain activity, or inadvertently control your limbs.
European regulators are beginning to respond. The EU’s Medical Device Regulation (MDR 2017/745) now explicitly requires manufacturers to follow “state of the art” cybersecurity practices, from secure design to risk management. Future healthcare infrastructure projects are expected to include cybersecurity plans for every connected machine. But compliance alone isn’t enough; organizations must adopt a new mindset that respects the sanctity of the human-digital interface.
What Businesses Should Do Now
Business leaders in energy, healthcare, and technology must treat climate and bio-digital risk on par with malware and phishing. The following actions are urgent:
- Integrate Climate Risk into Cyber/BCM Planning — Update your risk assessments and continuity plans to include extreme weather scenarios. Use climate data and forecasts to stress-test your infrastructure: model what happens if a heatwave spikes demand (overloading cooling), or a flood cuts connectivity. Embrace dynamic forecasting tools (e.g., weather-influenced grid models) as part of your operational playbooks.
- Build Energy-Resilient Architecture — Wherever possible, aim for grid independence for critical assets. This can include on-site renewables (solar, small wind) coupled with battery storage, so that, in a black-sky event, your facilities can island themselves from the grid. For data centers or hospitals, consider co-locating gas-fired generators or fuel cells that automatically engage if grid power fails.
- Secure the Bio-Digital Interface — Treat all medical and wearable devices as IT assets. Conduct a full inventory of connected health equipment and IoT endpoints. Segment these devices on isolated networks with strict access controls and encryption. Apply the principle of Zero Trust: By default, no device is trusted. Require unique credentials or certificates for each device, and turn on automatic update mechanisms wherever possible.
- Update Emergency and Continuity Plans Holistically — In your business continuity management playbooks, do not assume disasters only come as storms or hacks. They now they may be both. Update incident response exercises to layer cyber scenarios onto natural disaster drills. For instance, if a hurricane is forecast, practice both data center evacuation and simultaneous cyber containment measures.
- Foster Cross-Sector Collaboration — Because these threats span domains, coordinate with peers in energy, healthcare, and environmental agencies. Join industry working groups on climate resilience and cyber risk. Share anonymized incident data (for example, did a flood knock out any facilities last quarter?) so the whole sector can learn.
Each of these actions aligns technology and human factors with an awareness of environmental change. Integrating climate into IT risk management and hardening our bodies-as-devices are both new frontiers, but the tools exist: Framework-based risk management (ISO 31000, IEC 31010 for climate risk) can be extended to cover these domains.
As a practical example, some organizations are already piloting digital twin models of their operations that can simulate a grid failure, a heatwave, or even a pandemic, and measure the impact on services. The goal is not just to protect data, but to protect life and continuity in all its forms.
Getronics: Pioneering Resilience in the Face of Emerging Cyber Risks
Getronics is uniquely positioned to help clients bridge the climate-tech-human divide with concrete solutions. We have been integrating Operational Technology (OT) and IT for decades, and our experience now focuses on making systems resilient by design.
- Grid Independence and Microgrids — We help critical sites become self-sufficient. Our engineers design and implement islanding systems and microgrids so that essential loads (servers, lights, medical devices) stay powered even if the public grid fails. For example, a recent project at AMRC Cymru saw us deploy an IoT-powered energy management platform that continuously measures electricity and water use across the factory. Just by giving operators real-time visibility, the plant reduced energy draw by ~25%.
- Bio-Digital Resilience — Our security architecture covers everything from MRI machines to wearables. Getronics has developed secure-by-design frameworks (based on NIST and MITRE) for healthcare and industrial clients. We advise manufacturers on MDR and IEC standards, and we perform penetration tests on medical networks to close gaps.
- Holistic Security and Continuity — Beyond specific solutions, Getronics provides end-to-end managed security services. We operate an EU-based 24×7 Security Operations Centre staffed by over 100 experts. Our SOC ingests billions of events monthly (across thousands of log sources), correlates threats, and responds immediately to incidents. We customize NIST/MITRE-based threat models for each client while handling compliance with standards like ISO 27001 and GDPR.
In all our efforts, Getronics’ approach is resilience from the ground up. We think about what could go wrong in the context of emerging climate and bio threats, and then we build our solution around it. By aligning physical redundancies (power, cooling, barriers) with digital defenses (cyber hygiene, detection, zero trust), we enable organizations to protect data, electricity, and people as one unified system.
Building Resilience for the Future
Climate change and biotechnology are reshaping the cyber threat landscape. As EU policy leaders now recognize, we live in a changing world where extreme weather, human health, and digital security can no longer be managed in isolation. Blackouts, heatwaves and floods are bound to grow, and next-generation biotech will become ubiquitous. The stakes are high, and failure to adapt now could lead to simultaneous physical and cyber catastrophes.
For decision-makers in energy, healthcare, and critical infrastructure, you must think holistically: Protect your data centers and power systems together, and consider every human-associated device a potential target. Update your risk models, invest in independence and monitoring, and partner with experienced integrators. Getronics stands ready to guide this transformation with experts who can audit your climate-cyber risks, architect the right islanding or renewable solutions, and lock down any bio-digital vulnerabilities.
Act now to build cross-domain resilience. Future threats will not announce themselves, and waiting for regulations is too late
