Hackers heat French supermarket fridges, sparking fires and spoiling food

By Leo Marchandon and Gabriel Stargardter

The Paris prosecutor's office said on Monday that a "large-scale" attack was "affecting connected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France", leading to food losses and fires.

Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has instructed France's National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) to investigate, a person in his office said.

France was coordinating with European counterparts because other countries could also be affected, the person said, adding that authorities were assessing whether other French companies were at risk.

Felix Aime, a senior cyber threat intelligence analyst at Sekoia Threat Detection and Research, said Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium had also been affected.

Carrefour CARR.PA said 80 of its supermarkets were hit, while Monoprix, which operates about 490 stores in France, said 5% of its stores were affected.

Les Mousquetaires, owner of retailer Intermarche, said fridges at around 150 of its stores were heated up to 50 C for six hours overnight. A spokesperson said all affected food had been discarded to eliminate health risks.

Paris resident Geert de Clercq witnessed staff at an Intermarche in central Paris throwing cartfuls of defrosted frozen foods into a giant trash container, with molten ice cream sloshing out of broken tubs on the street.

Cooperative U CEO Dominique Schelcher said his supermarket group had also been targeted.

"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," he wrote on X.

Food retailers E.Leclerc and Auchan did not respond to requests for comment.

There was no immediate estimate of industry-wide losses, but Intermarche CEO Thierry Cotillard told BFM TV the "unprecedented" attack would represent losses amounting to "tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day."

Christel Delberghe, director general at European retail association Eurocommerce, said, "This incident underlines the importance of resilience across the entire supply chain."

COLD AISLES CONTROLLED OVER INTERNET

Supermarket cold aisles are typically run by control panels that manage an entire store's fridges and freezers and can be accessed over the internet, which lets maintenance companies adjust them from anywhere.

The source close to Lecornu said ANSSI had identified a vulnerability in software supplied by Danish company Danfoss.

Danfoss said it was "aware of incidents in France affecting a limited number of refrigeration management systems".

The affected units "were running outdated firmware", Danfoss said, adding that it had "long advised customers to keep supported systems updated with the latest firmware and to migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions".

On August 9, cybersecurity firm Claroty's Team82 published research detailing vulnerabilities in the Danfoss AK-SM 800A controller. According to the report, software updates issued by Danfoss addressed issues that could have allowed attackers to bypass authentication controls and execute code on compromised devices.

The attacks resemble disruptions reported at about a dozen US military commissaries in late August that led to food losses after fridges were affected.

In a statement, French retail association Fédération du Commerce et de la Distribution called for "full transparency" from Danfoss about the incident. It said supermarkets aimed to protect consumers and return to normal operations as soon as possible. The FCD said some impacted stores were already back up and running.

DUTCH SECURITY ISSUE

Dutch retailer Ahold Delhaize AD.AS, which operates the Netherlands' largest supermarket chain Albert Heijn and has major operations in the US, said it was dealing with a "security issue" on its network and had taken several systems offline as a precaution.

A message on the retailer's smartphone app said it was unable to deliver groceries because of a "cybersecurity incident".

Online orders account for about 10% of Albert Heijn sales. Physical stores remained open, while Dutch news agency ANP reported that rival retailers had seen a surge in delivery orders.

Ahold Delhaize said there was no reason to see a link between the incidents in France and its supermarkets.

Ahold is the fourth-largest grocery retailer in the US. Websites for its Stop & Shop, Giant, Hannaford and Food Lion chains displayed notices saying "site temporarily down".

It was unclear whether other operations had been affected.

(Reporting by Leo Marchandon, Helen Reid, AJ Vincens, Makini Brice, Toby Sterling; Writing by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Richard Lough, Alexander Smith, Mark Potter and Cynthia Osterman)