Paris prosecutors have opened a probe into the incident, news outlets report.
Hundreds of French supermarkets fell victim to a cyberattack on Sunday (11 October) after hackers turned up the temperatures of remotely controlled refrigerators as high as 50 degree Celsius, leading to food waste and fires.
Around 150 to 200 Intermarché stores, owned by Groupement Mousquetaires, were affected in the attack, as well as 80 Coopérative U outlets and around 80 Carrefour supermarkets.
France’s largest supermarket chain, E. Leclerc, has also been reportedly attacked. Meanwhile, Monoprix said about 5pc of its 490-some stores were hit.
Hackers reportedly accessed cooling systems and set them to defrost, causing refrigeration systems overheating for around six hours.
The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed the attacks with news outlets and said that it has opened an investigation into “the large-scale cyberattack” affecting the cold rooms of several major food retail chains across France.
The probe aims to identify victims and establish a link with the damage they have reported in relation to food waste and fires.
Targeting essential equipment such as food refrigerators is “extremely serious and unprecedented”, said Coopérative U CEO Dominique Schelcher in a translated post on X yesterday (12 October).
“Our teams are fully mobilised, in contact with refrigeration technicians, to restore the situation as quickly as possible. An investigation will be conducted to shed full light on this attack.”
Mousquetaires’s cooling systems are managed by Danish refrigeration firm Danfoss, which said that it is working with its customers to resolve the issue. A spokesperson from the Danish company told Bloomberg that a majority of the affected systems are old and no longer receive updates.
“Danfoss has long advised customers to keep supported systems updated with the latest firmware and to migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions.”
Reports also suggest that France’s cybersecurity agency had already identified vulnerabilities in the “software supplied by a Danish company”. The agency is in contact with its European counterparts as other countries may also be affected, sources said.
The attack comes after the UK’s National Audit Office named cyberattacks as one of the major threats facing the country’s food supply chain just last month.
In recent weeks, a barrage of cyberattacks have threatened to disrupt public and private services across Japan, Spain, Norway, Denmark, Germany and Italy.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.