Hackers heat French supermarket fridges to 50C; causing fires, food losses

A cyberattack on supermarket refrigeration systems in France caused fires and food losses at hundreds of stores after hackers raised fridge temperatures to 50 degrees Celsius, prompting a national investigation and concerns about possible incidents elsewhere in Europe and the United States.

The Paris prosecutor’s office described the attack as “large-scale”, saying it affected connected refrigerators at several major food retailers. The damage included fires and spoiled food.

Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu instructed France’s National Cybersecurity Agency, ANSSI, to investigate. His office said France was coordinating with European counterparts as authorities examined whether other countries or French companies could be affected.

Les Mousquetaires, the owner of Intermarche, said about 150 stores had been targeted. Their fridges were heated to 50C for six hours, forcing the company to discard food to avoid health risks.

Carrefour said 80 of its supermarkets had been affected, although the vast majority of its 6,000 stores remained unaffected. Cooperative U chief executive Dominique Schelcher also confirmed an attack, calling the targeting of equipment essential to food preservation and supply “of extreme gravity and unprecedented”.

Other French chains, including Monoprix, E.Leclerc and Auchan, did not respond to requests for comment.

Dutch supermarket operator Ahold Delhaize said it was dealing with a “security issue” in its network and had taken several systems offline as a precaution. It was not immediately clear whether the Dutch incident was connected to the French attack.

The Albert Heijn supermarket app told customers it could not deliver groceries because of a cybersecurity incident. Its physical stores remained open, while Dutch news agency ANP reported that rival retailers had seen an increase in delivery orders.

Ahold Delhaize, the fourth-largest grocery retailer in the United States, also had temporary outage notices on the websites of its Stop & Shop, Giant, Hannaford and Food Lion chains. The extent of the disruption to its other operations was unclear.

A 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 The affected units were running outdated firmware, the company said, urging customers to keep supported systems updated and migrate older equipment to current-generation solutions.