Cyber attack heats French supermarket fridges to 50C — SkimNews
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- Danfoss, the Danish engineering firm whose remote-management software runs supermarket cold units, was the vector for the attack; the firm said affected units were older models whose security software could not be updated and that it had 'long advised' businesses to keep systems current.
- Coopérative U, Intermarché, and Netto were among the hardest hit, with more than 100 Coopérative U stores and 180 Intermarché/Netto stores affected; Intermarché said a further 100 shops were urgently disconnected from the internet as a precaution.
- Carrefour (80 of 6,000 stores) and Monoprix (roughly 5% of its 400-plus stores) were also breached, putting the nationwide total at around 400 of France's roughly 15,000 supermarkets.
- Intermarché reported its fridges reached 50°C for six hours overnight into Monday; French broadcaster BFMTV published an image of a freezer at 26.5°C, and managers arriving at several chains found small fires and a wave of hot air when they opened freezer doors.
- Two supermarkets in the Alsace region reported combined losses of €270,000 (£228,000) from food discarded on health grounds, with French prosecutors warning the nationwide total could run into millions of euros.
- The Paris prosecutor's office opened a formal cyber-crime investigation into what it called a 'large-scale cyber-attack affecting the refrigerators of several major food retail chains across France,' and European Food Commissioner Christophe Hansen condemned the hack, posting on X that 'the weaponisation of food has become a reality.'
Why it matters: A single Danish software vendor's unpatchable legacy controllers took out competing French retailers simultaneously, exposing how concentrated cold-chain software dependencies can cascade across rivals in one night. Two Alsace stores alone lost €270,000, and with roughly 400 of France's 15,000 supermarkets affected, the Paris prosecutor's formal probe signals this is being treated as critical-infrastructure sabotage, not ordinary cybercrime.
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