A cyber attack targeting French supermarket fridges pushed many of them to 50 degrees overnight Monday, causing fires and food losses across the country.
On Monday, the Paris prosecutors’ office said the “large-scale” attack was “affecting connected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France”.
The French prime minister Sébastien Lecornu instructed the country’s national cyber security agency, ANSSI, to investigate, a person from his office told Reuters.
The attack, which targeted fridges using software provided by Danish company Danfoss, hit major chains across the country.
In a statement to the newswire, a spokesperson for Les Mousquetaires, which owns retailer Intermarche, said around 150 of its stores had been hit, with fridges heated to 50 degrees for six hours. It was forced to throw away all affected food to avoid sanitary risks, they added.
On social media site X, chief executive of Coopérative U Dominique Schelcher confirmed that several stores in the chain’s network were affected, saying: “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.”
Carrefour, one of the largest supermarket chains in the country, said that 80 of its stores had been targeted, but that the vast majority of its 6,000-strong estate had not been hit.
Dutch supermarket giant Ahold Delhaize also faced a cyber attack on Monday. The group, which operates the Netherlands’s largest supermarket chain Albert Hijn and has substantial operations in the US, said in a statement that it had taken some systems offline to allow its teams to deal with a “security issue” on its network.
A spokesperson for Ahold Delhaize told Retail Systems that there was no apparent link between the security issue and the hack on French supermarkets.
Cyber attacks on retailers have increased in recent years, with a wave of high-profile hacks last year costing businesses collective billions of dollars.
