France vows tough response to freezer cyberattack blamed on Iran

France's foreign minister said on Tuesday, November 10, that Paris ruled out "nothing" to respond to a major cyberattack on hundreds of supermarket fridges in October that it has blamed on Iran.

Hundreds of French supermarkets were hit in the October 11 and 12 cyberattacks, which raised the temperatures in their refrigerators, forcing many to throw away entire inventories of perishable food.

Along with summoning Iran's ambassador and seeking European-level sanctions, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said France would "rule nothing out and will take all measures − including those we may not disclose publicly − that we deem proportionate and necessary to deter any further attacks."

The goal, Barrot told FranceinfoTV, is "to deter anyone who might be tempted, in Iran or elsewhere, to do it again." Barrot said Monday that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was behind cyberattacks on supermarkets in the first such large-scale cyber sabotage on French territory.

"This attack is unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression," Barrot said on the sidelines of a G7 foreign ministers' meeting in Paris. Iran's ambassador was received on Tuesday by the French Foreign Ministry's secretary general, the ministry said.

'Swift and united response'

On Tuesday, Iran said French accusations that it was responsible for cyberattacks on supermarket fridges last month were "baseless." "Iran's foreign ministry categorically rejects the French government's baseless and one-sided accusations against Iran regarding alleged cyber activities in France," the ministry said in a statement, adding that it "strongly condemns this hackneyed policy of levelling accusations against the Islamic Republic" of Iran.

Iran's ambassador was received on Tuesday by the French foreign ministry's secretary-general, the ministry said.

Meanwhile, the European Union said that it would look to provide a "swift and united response," pending discussion with member states, after France's announcement. "As the EU, we have consistently called on all states to refrain from malicious behaviour in the cyber space, and we will continue to address such malicious behaviour, making use of all the tools that we have, also under the EU cyber diplomacy toolbox, including sanctions," said EU spokesman Anouar El Anouni.

Similar incidents have since been reported in at least eleven other European countries in early November. On November 2, stores in at least nine other European countries were hit by a suspected cyberattack on their freezer systems.

'Offensive cyber unit' Guards

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said Monday she had opened an investigation into Shahid Kaveh, a shadowy cyber unit of the IRGC, the Islamic Republic's ideological army, over the attacks. The prosecutor's office has requested international arrest warrants be issued for two Shahid Kaveh officials. Beccuau described the entity as "an offensive cyber unit affiliated with the Electronic and Cyber Center of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC-CEC)."

France's Center for Coordination of Cyber Crises, which groups security agencies including the intelligence services, said the unit "conducts large-scale campaigns targeting industrial equipment for the purpose of sabotage, directed primarily against Israel and the United States, but also against France and other European countries."

The United States and Israel fought a war against Iran that began with the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28. European countries did not get involved in that conflict, but French officials have accused Iran of spreading misinformation related to the protests that have rocked France over the past month.

In the cyberattacks in France, which targeted 700 sites, the attackers took over cooling systems using web interfaces to "initiate abnormal, indefinite defrost cycles" and disable alerts from sensors designed to go off when temperatures exceeded a certain threshold, Beccuau said.

Sweden's Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin warned, on Tuesday, that more cyberattacks could be expected in the coming months, as AI tools have made it easier to detect vulnerabilities. Bohlin also told reporters that while Swedish grocery stores had also seen their refrigeration systems targeted last week, it was not yet possible to say if there was a connection to the attacks in France, noting the sabotage would have "been easy to copy."