Imagine walking into your local supermarket and finding the freezer aisle blowing hot air. That’s what happened at dozens of grocery stores across Europe last night, after hackers remotely cranked up the temperature of their fridges and freezers to a scorching 50°C (122°F).
What is happening?
According to the BBC, around 40 Delhaize stores in Belgium and Luxembourg, several ICA and Coop stores in Sweden, and 13 SuperValu shops in Ireland were hit. El País adds that 15 Carrefour and five Spar stores in Belgium were affected, and stores in the Netherlands, Estonia, and Finland ran into the same trouble.
“I was woken up by alarms that started appearing on my phone around 3 a.m.,” the manager of several Delhaize stores in Brussels told Belgian broadcaster RTBF. By then, the food was already spoiled. One Delhaize store in Hoeilaart told Het Laatste Nieuws it had to bin €100,000 worth of food.
“We can’t regulate the temperature, we can’t change it. Hot air is getting into the freezers. Everything is ruined,” Rickard Nilsson, manager of an ICA store in Sjöbo, told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, according to El País.
Haven’t we seen this before?
Last month, the BBC reported that around 400 French supermarkets, including Intermarché, Coopérative U, Carrefour, Monoprix, and E.Leclerc, were hit in a similar attack. The hackers went after refrigeration software from Danish firm Danfoss, which explained that the hacked units were older machines it could no longer patch against the threat.
A few stores reported small fires. Coopérative U’s CEO called it an “extremely serious and unprecedented” attack, and French prosecutors are now treating it as a cybercrime case. According to Reuters, the Pentagon is taking a second look at fridges that failed at several US military bases this summer, suspecting hackers may have been involved.
What does this mean for you?
Nobody knows who is behind these attacks yet, but stores are binning the spoiled food, so it shouldn’t reach your cart. The bigger worry is that a boring supermarket freezer is now a target. Experts cited by El País believe stronger cybersecurity and regular software updates could have prevented this. As EU Food Commissioner Christophe Hansen put it, “the weaponisation of food has become a reality.”
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