A cyber attack launched this past Sunday against several supermarket chains in France caused fresh and frozen merchandise to spoil, generating losses valued at millions of euros, as confirmed by the owner of one of the affected companies.
The hackers managed to enter the remote control system of the refrigeration systems and launched a rapid defrosting program, placing the machines at 50 degrees, which caused the food to spoil.
After this, the French government ordered the opening of an investigation focused essentially on possible security failures of the Danish company ‘Danfoss’, responsible for the affected refrigeration systems.
Other EU countries affected
Executive sources indicated that Paris is in contact with other potentially affected European Union (EU) countries. Now, the French government’s objective is to establish the perimeter that has been damaged in France.
The European Commissioner for Agriculture, Christophe Hansen, condemned the attacks on the social network X, called for increased surveillance and warned that “the instrumentalization of food has become a reality.”
“Attacking equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products and the food supply of the French is extremely serious and unprecedented. It is unacceptable,” the head of the Coopérative U supermarkets, Dominique Schelcher, wrote in X.
The affected chains
In addition to its chain, the attack also affected various companies such as Intermarché, Netto, Leclerc, Monoprix and, according to some media, also some Carrefour supermarkets.
Some of these groups communicated how many of their stores were affected, while others have preferred to remain silent. The Mousquetaires group, owner of Intermarché and Netto, estimated the affected stores at “at least 300”, Coopérative U at “a hundred”, while Leclerc did not specify the figures and Monoprix said “about thirty”.
Various companies in the freezer sector, whose systems were affected, are holding a crisis meeting to find out how the attack could have occurred and introduce mechanisms to avoid it in the future. The Danish company Danfoss already warned on September 18 that it had detected security cracks in its computer systems.
Belgian and Dutch supermarkets also suffer incidents
The Belgian and Dutch supermarkets Delhaize and Albert Heijn suffered failures on their websites and mobile applications this Monday and were forced to cancel home deliveries as a result of what their parent company, Ahold Delhaize, described as a “cybersecurity incident.”
Ahold Delhaize said in a statement that its teams are taking “measures to assess and mitigate” a “security issue on its network,” including “taking some systems offline to protect them,” although all of its stores remain open.
“Protecting our infrastructure for the benefit of our customers, employees and partners is a top priority. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused our customers and partners,” they added.
A Delhaize spokesperson explained to the Belga news agency that most of the impact had fallen on internal computer systems and not on tools accessible to the client.
