By Leo Marchandon and Gabriel Stargardter
PARIS, Oct 12 (Reuters) – Hackers forced the temperature of many French supermarket fridges up to 50 degrees Celsius (122°F) overnight, causing fires and food losses at several hundred stores across the country in a major 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, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu instructed France’s National Cybersecurity Agency ANSSI to investigate, a person in his office said.
They said France “was coordinating with its European counterparts, as other countries may also be affected,” while also investigating whether any other French firms were at risk.
Les Mousquetaires, which owns retailer Intermarche, said around 150 of its stores had been hit, with fridges heated up to 50 degrees Celsius for six hours. It had thrown all the food away to avoid any sanitary risks, a spokesperson said.
And Cooperative U CEO Dominique Schelcher said his supermarket had also been hit 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 hit but that the vast majority of its 6,000 stores had not been affected.
Several other supermarket chains, including Monoprix, E.Leclerc and Auchan, did not respond to requests for comment.
DUTCH SECURITY ISSUE
Dutch supermarket operator Ahold Delhaize, which operates the Netherlands’ largest supermarket chain Albert Heijn and has substantial operations in the United States, 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% 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 source close to 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”.
(Reporting by Leo Marchandon; Writing by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Richard Lough and Alexander Smith)
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