A hacking attack on European supermarkets spread across the continent on Monday, hitting fridges and freezers from Sweden to Belgium and forcing stores to throw away food in an incident that echoed a similar attack in France last month.
The attack, which raised temperatures in refrigerator and freezer units at dozens of stores, hit supermarket groups Ahold Delhaize (AD.AS), and Colruyt (COLR.BR), in Belgium and Luxembourg, as well as Swedish grocers ICA and Coop. Furniture-to-meatballs retailer IKEA also saw at least one store affected.
“Everything is destroyed,” Engla Ingwall, sales manager at an ICA franchise store in Stockholm, told Reuters during a visit to the store on Monday, adding the attack occurred at 2 a.m. (0100 GMT) but was only noticed hours later.
“There has been a cyberattack and all our freezers reached 50 degrees (Celsius).”
A spokesperson for privately held ICA said the company was aware that a “limited number of stores were affected by an incident overnight, which impacted their refrigeration and freezer systems”.
The latest incidents follow an attack in France last month when police said hackers seized control of cooling units at hundreds of supermarkets, causing fires and food losses. Ahold also reported a cybersecurity incident to police last month.
While no one has claimed responsibility for either attack, the incidents have heightened concerns among European authorities about hybrid threats to infrastructure amid growing security tensions since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow has repeatedly denied involvement in sabotage or hybrid warfare operations. Reuters could not establish who was behind Monday’s attacks or whether they were linked to the incidents in France.
“It is not known who is behind this attack, and it may never be determined,” said Katrien Eggers, spokesperson for Belgium’s Centre for Cybersecurity, adding she was concerned about the growing number of incidents, in part due to AI.
“All IT systems are potentially vulnerable, and AI can now be used to successfully exploit these weaknesses — especially by sophisticated actors,” she said.
‘RETAIL IS AN EASY TARGET’
From refrigerators and heating systems to security cameras and alarms, an expanding range of devices once largely mechanical can now be monitored and controlled remotely, creating new opportunities for cybercriminals.
At least some of the refrigerator units affected on Monday used temperature control technology from Danish firm Danfoss that was also targeted in the French attack. The firm said it had been working with customers to implement fixes.
The European Commission said the latest incidents highlighted how digital threats are becoming increasingly disruptive.
“They are a deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain and undermine consumers’ confidence in it – a warning that we must take seriously,” said EU commissioner for agriculture Christophe Hansen. “The repeated occurrence of these cyberattacks is deeply concerning.”
A spokesperson for Colruyt Group, which operates Spar stores in Belgium under a franchise system, said five shops had their fridge systems attacked.
In Ireland, wholesaler Musgrave said the incident affected systems in 13 of its SuperValu stores, forcing it to remove some chilled and frozen products from sale.
“Our monitoring systems alerted us to the issue and we took immediate action,” it said in a statement. “Our investigation is ongoing.”
Tom Hegel, a researcher at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, said such attacks were typically linked to extortion, political motives or nation-state operations, with the absence of financial demands in recent cases pointing instead to sabotage.
“Retail is an easy target because retail chains run enormous estates of refrigeration controllers, building management systems, door access panels and point-of-sale gear,” he said, adding it was hard to trace hackers targeting such systems.
“An attacker who logs into an exposed control panel leaves almost nothing behind … A teenager and an intelligence service would look much the same from the defender’s side.”
