New Delhi: The heat is officially turning up in France. Hackers have now turned supermarket refrigerators into weapons of destruction, raising temperatures in fridges and freezers to as high as 50°C, which has often even triggered fires at hundreds of stores.
“Targeting equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products and to the food supply of the French people is of extreme gravity and is unprecedented,” Dominique Schelcher, chief executive of supermarket group Coopérative U, wrote on X.
The cyberattack began on the night of 11 October and hit major French retail chains, including Intermarché, Coopérative U and E. Leclerc, Carrefour and Monoprix. Thousands of euros worth of perishable food had to be discarded, while retailers faced substantial financial losses.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu asked the National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) to investigate this incident further, while the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed that a probe had been opened into the country-wide attack.
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The attack exploited the systems that regulate refrigeration. Supermarkets do not necessarily control each refrigerator and freezer independently. Their cold-storage equipment is often managed through central control panels, which monitor temperatures and regulate cooling cycles across a store. These systems can be accessed remotely.
According to Reuters, investigators identified a vulnerability in software supplied by Danish company Danfoss, which manufactures refrigeration management systems. The affected equipment was running outdated software or firmware, which left it exposed to security risks.
Danfoss said it was aware of incidents in France affecting a limited number of refrigeration management systems. It said that the affected units were running outdated firmware and that it had long advised customers to keep supported systems updated with the latest firmware and to migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions.
The Paris prosecutor’s office also reported fires associated with the attack.
The scale of the disruption was considerable. Mousquetaires Group, which owns Intermarché, reported that around 150 of its stores had been affected, while Carrefour said 80 of its supermarkets were hit. Monoprix reported that about 5 per cent of its roughly 490 French stores were affected.
Thierry Cotillard, CEO of Mousquetaires, told French broadcaster BFM TV that the attack could cause losses amounting to “tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day”.