Someone Turned Europe's Supermarket Freezers Up to 50°C

Supermarkets in several European countries were hit by a cyberattack overnight on 2 November, with refrigerators and freezers in dozens of stores warming up and food having to be thrown away. Stores belonging to Ahold Delhaize and Colruyt in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected, as were the Swedish chains ICA and Coop and at least one IKEA store.

At an ICA franchise in Stockholm, sales manager Engla Ingvall found that everything in her store had been ruined. The attack came at two in the morning and went unnoticed for hours. "Someone launched a cyberattack and the temperature in all our freezers rose to 50°C," she said.

The pattern follows a similar incident in France last month, when attackers took control of refrigeration equipment in hundreds of supermarkets, starting fires and destroying stock. Nobody has claimed responsibility for either campaign.

"We don't know yet who is behind it, and we may never find out," said Katrien Eggers, a spokesperson for Belgium's national cybersecurity centre. She linked the growing frequency of such incidents partly to artificial intelligence: every IT system has weak points, and attackers — the more skilled ones especially — can now use AI to find them.

Why grocery chains? Tom Hegel, a researcher at the security firm SentinelOne, points to the sheer number of devices a large retailer has to manage: refrigeration controllers, building management systems, door access, point-of-sale terminals. All of them are networked, and some are exposed to the internet. Attribution is equally hard. An attacker who logs into a control panel that is already reachable leaves almost no trace. "A teenager and an intelligence agency can look the same from the defending side," Hegel said. Such attacks usually involve extortion, politics or state action; because no ransom was demanded this time, he believes sabotage is the more likely explanation.

The equipment in some affected stores used temperature-control technology from Danfoss, a Danish company, which said it has been helping customers with repairs. The European Commission called the incident evidence that cyber threats are causing ever more serious damage. Its agriculture commissioner, Christophe Hansen, was blunt: someone is deliberately damaging the food supply chain to undermine consumer trust in it.

The losses are concrete. Coop said seven of its 800 stores had their refrigeration settings altered remotely. Colruyt reported five SPAR stores affected. In Ireland, wholesaler Musgrave said 13 SuperValu shops had problems and some chilled stock had to be pulled. Carrefour, badly hit by last month's French attack, had 15 of its 700 Belgian stores affected this time. At a butcher's shop in Antwerp, the owner was woken at 3:30am and found his chiller at 18°C; he estimates 15,000 euros of meat was lost.