By Raphael Satter and Gabriel Stargardter
PARIS, Nov 9 (Reuters) – French officials suspect that Iranian state-backed hackers were behind the cyberattacks that knocked out commercial refrigerators and freezers across France last month, two people familiar with the matter said Monday.
That would make the hacks among the most disruptive cyberattacks of the war with Iran that began in February, a conflict that has been marked by scattered incidents of alleged cyber disruption. These have included disruptions to the Los Angeles transit system in March, to US water treatment plants in July and to ships bound for the United States in August.
The French foreign ministry and the Paris prosecutor’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not return messages seeking comment. Iran routinely denies carrying out malicious cyber operations.
The October 11 cyberattack, which overrode the temperature controls on commercial fridges in hundreds of establishments, appeared to have been easy to pull off, cybersecurity experts previously told Reuters. The firm behind many of the stricken units said that several were obsolete or were running outdated firmware, which could have made it easy for hackers to break in.
(Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter in Paris and Raphael Satter in Washington; editing by Chris Sanders and Will Dunham)
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