Breaking the (supply) chain: The growing security threats behind Europe’s logistics
Aerial view of a highway with trucks in transit. Image: iStock
20 May 2025
As the European logistics network becomes ever-more important, its vulnerability to targeted disruptions from various actors grows. These threats, ranging from theft and criminal infiltration to sabotage, highlight the need to shift toward more proactive, intelligence-led strategies to secure critical infrastructure and maintain supply chain resilience.
By Jeanne Albin, LandRisk Manager
As logistics systems grow more interconnected, and state and non-state threat actors alike leverage the complexity of the supply chain to conduct targeted operations, there is an urgent need for a proactive, intelligence-led approach to detecting, disrupting, and deterring hostile infiltration into these vital networks. It is, however, an effort made all the more difficult by the diverse nature of these actors and the motivations driving their actions, ranging from economic gain to strategic disruption.
On the one hand, the potential for enormous economic benefits continues to draw organised crime groups’ (OCGs) attention towards logistics operations. Though mostly fuelled by profit-seeking activities, these networks can still exert a profound (and, one could argue, disproportionate) impact on societies. Alongside financial considerations and operational disruptions, thefts of chemicals or pharmaceuticals, for example, have been linked to significant risks to public safety or environmental hazards, whilst the theft of copper cables frequently leads to facility closure, power outages, and disruptions of railway operations.
Perhaps more importantly, OCGs targeting the supply chain often do so in parallel with other illegal operations, thereby creating a more entrenched criminal ecosystem linked to a range of violent and illicit activities. This tends to further complicate law enforcement efforts, directly affect public safety, and, more generally, contribute to instability. And despite awareness efforts, many operators are still wrongly prepared for the increasing sophistication displayed by some of the more resourceful perpetrators, equipped with technology and detailed knowledge of security protocols or routing schedules and motivated to target even the most secure vehicles or facilities when contemplating the possibility of large economic gains.
In fact, these actors do not simply exploit vulnerabilities; instead, they often actively shape the local threat environment. Indeed, through methods such as corruption or intimidation, for example, OCGs are known to carry out operations (including theft, of course, but also drug or counterfeit goods trafficking, to name a few) with alarming efficiency. In many ways, these enterprises rely on the complexities of global supply chain operations (such as the industry’s dependency on subcontractors), which create ample opportunity for concealment and acts of fraud. Driver, port and warehouse staff, logistics service providers: all have been implicated in facilitating organised theft or illicit trade, sometimes unknowingly. Once compromised, these supply chain nodes serve as a persistent gateway for illicit flows that erode the reliability of the entire system.
On the other hand, acts of sabotage and targeted disruptions—many tied to broader geopolitical tensions—have significantly unsettled both logistics industry leaders and public authorities. At the heart of the issue lies the strategic role supply chains play in European economic stability. The smooth operation of logistics transports ensures the delivery of essentials: food, energy, pharmaceuticals, electronics, industrial parts, and many more. Disruptions, even minor or localised, can have cascading and destabilising effects.
A striking example occurred in the summer of 2024, when three separate incidents of parcel fires targeting courier companies in the UK, Germany and Poland set private operators and public authorities alike on high alert and raised questions about the need for improved efforts to detect and counteract transnational threats, sometimes straddling the line between criminal motivation and geopolitical messaging. More recently, the arrests of three men suspected of planning an attack on freight transport systems in Germany on behalf of Russia reiterated the risk of logistics infrastructure becoming a target of hybrid attacks, which, irrespective of their underlying motivations, may result in significant disruptions and the erosion of supply chain integrity.
All in all, this all reveals how the complexity of and dependence on supply chain operations create vulnerabilities that determined actors (state-backed or otherwise) can exploit to significant effects. This also highlights the need for authorities and the industry alike to reassess their threat models in light of increasingly complex security challenges. Indeed, it is clear that the threats facing European supply chain operations are no longer simple, isolated or incidental: they are often structural, transnational, and, increasingly, strategic. Organised criminality, illicit infiltration within legal operations, and hybrid threats converge to test the resilience of a logistics system foundational to Europe’s economic stability.
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