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A bizarre event saw thousands of supermarket fridges targeted and mountains of food wasted. But as cyber-attacks like these become more common, their destabilising power proves more insidious than silly.
When supermarket staff arrived early on Sunday morning to stock shelves across France, they found food cooking in the freezers. Some chiller cabinets had risen from as low as -27C to well over 50C, and one shop in Normandy reported a freezer pushed to 80C. The extreme temperature rise had sparked fires in some locations, triggering sprinklers and water damage.
Besides structural implications, mountains of food had to be thrown away after it started to defrost and then cook. ‘It was a catastrophe,’ said one worker at an Intermarche supermarket in Paris. ‘They pushed the freezers here up to 26C. Everything had to be thrown away. It was such a waste.’
But who are ‘they’? When the incident was first reported, shop managers assumed it was an isolated technical failure. But it soon became apparent that hundreds of stores across France had been targeted in a ‘bizarre and unprecedented’ cyber-attack.
Intermarché, Coopérative U, Carrefour, E Leclerc and Monoprix were among the chains affected, with up to 700 stores reportedly targeted. France’s national cybersecurity agency was called in to investigate, while the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an inquiry into the damage. The identity and motives of the attackers remain unknown.
The hackers had exploited connected refrigeration controllers, which allow supermarket staff and contractors to monitor temperatures and manage equipment remotely.
According to initial investigations, vulnerable systems supplied by the Danish manufacturer Danfoss had been compromised. Outdated software and security flaws may have allowed attackers to override temperature settings, while disabling alarms or extending defrost cycles gave staff less chance of spotting the problem before it was too late.
There’s something quite cartoonish about the idea of hackers breaking into a supermarket to turn the freezers into ovens. But the consequences are far from funny. Beyond the immediate financial losses, the attack exposed a vulnerability at the heart of an industry responsible for keeping the public fed.
Modern supermarkets depend on an intricate network of connected systems, and the convenience of connecting those systems (delivery, stock and infrastructure) means faults are identified quickly and maintenance can be carried out without someone having to be physically present. But every connection creates another potential point of entry for hackers like these.
And if hackers can manipulate equipment designed to preserve food, what else might they be able to interfere with? Water supplies, electricity networks and transport systems all rely on increasingly interconnected digital infrastructure. The potential for disruption is considerable, particularly when the aim is not to steal data or demand a ransom but to cause damage in the physical world.
