France vows tough response to freezer cyberattack blamed on Iran

PARIS (AFP) — France’s foreign minister said Tuesday that Paris ruled out “nothing” to respond to a major cyberattack on hundreds of supermarket fridges in October that it has blamed on Iran, accusations Tehran rejected as “baseless.”

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

Similar incidents were then reported in at least 11 other European countries in early November.

Along with summoning Iran’s ambassador and seeking European-level sanctions, Foreign Minister Jean-Noel 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 Franceinfo TV, is “to deter anyone who might be tempted, in Iran or elsewhere, to do it again.”

Barrot announced on Monday that France held Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responsible for the cyberattacks on supermarkets, 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 foreign ministry rejected the accusations as “baseless,” adding that it “strongly condemns this hackneyed policy of levelling accusations against the Islamic republic.”

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

The European Union said Tuesday 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 behavior in the cyber space, and we will continue to address such malicious behavior, making use of all the tools that we have, also under the EU cyber diplomacy toolbox, including sanctions,” said spokesman Anouar El Anouni.

‘Offensive cyber unit’

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 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 launched a war with Iran that began with the killing of supreme leader Ali Khamenei on Feb. 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 Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin on Tuesday warned 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.”

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