Hackers heat up hundreds of French supermarket fridges, causing fires and food loss

Hackers forced the temperature of many French supermarket fridges up to 50 degrees overnight, ​causing fires and food losses at several hundred shops across the country in a large cyberattack .

The Paris prosecutor’s office said a “large-scale” attack was “affecting connected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France” and reported damage included “food losses and fires”.

Meanwhile, the country’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, instructed France’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) to investigate, ​a spokesperson said.

They said France “was co-ordinating with its European counterparts, as other countries may also be affected” while also investigating whether any other French ⁠firms were at risk.

Les Mousquetaires, the co-operative that retailer owns Intermarche, said 150 of its stores had been affected, ‌with ‌fridges ​heated up to 50 degrees for six hours. It had thrown all the food away to avoid any sanitary risks, a spokesperson said.

Coopérative U chief executive Dominique Schelcher said his supermarket ⁠had also been targeted by the attack.

“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.

Carrefour said 80 of ‌its supermarkets had been affected but that the vast ​majority of its 6,000 stores had not been hit.

Several other supermarket chains, including Monoprix, E Leclerc and Auchan, did not respond ⁠to requests for .

Dutch supermarket operator ⁠Ahold Delhaize, which operates the ​Netherlands’ largest supermarket chain Albert Heijn, said it was also dealing with a “security issue” in its network, and had taken several systems offline to protect them.

A smartphone app for the retailer told clients that due to a “cybersecurity incident” it was unable to deliver groceries.

Online orders represent around 10 per cent of sales for Albert Heijn. Physical stores remained open and Dutch news agency ANP reported that rivals had seen an influx of delivery orders.

It was not clear if there was any link between the French supermarket ‌attack and the problems flagged ⁠by Ahold Delhaize.

Ahold is the fourth-largest grocery retailer in the US, where websites for its Stop & Shop, Giant, Hannaford and Food Lion stores all had notices saying “site temporarily down”.

It was unclear if other operations were ‌affected.

The spokesperson for 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”.