Hackers broke into the remote control systems running refrigeration at hundreds of French supermarkets overnight into Monday, driving fridge and freezer temperatures as high as 50°C (122°F) and spoiling food on a scale retailers called unprecedented. The Paris prosecutor's office described it as a "large-scale" attack "affecting connected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France," according to NBC News.
The damage spread across several of the country's largest chains. Carrefour said roughly 80 of its stores were hit. At Les Mousquetaires, which operates Intermarché, about 150 stores had fridges stuck at 50°C for six hours overnight. Monoprix said about 5% of its roughly 490 French stores were affected, and the Cooperative U group reported 80 of its 2,000 stores hit. E.Leclerc and Auchan did not respond to requests for comment. Cybersecurity analyst Felix Aime of the firm Sekoia said similar disruptions were reported in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium.
An Overlooked Vulnerability
Investigators tracing the breach found that supermarket cold-storage units are typically run by internet-connected control panels that let maintenance firms adjust temperatures remotely — the same convenience that left them exposed. A person close to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said France's cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, traced the intrusion to a flaw in refrigeration controllers made by the Danish manufacturer Danfoss. Danfoss said the affected units "were running outdated firmware" and that it had long urged customers to update their systems. The security firm Claroty had published research flagging vulnerabilities in the same Danfoss controllers back in August, warning they could let attackers bypass authentication and run malicious code.
The financial toll is still being tallied. Cooperative U's chief executive, Dominique Schelcher, said he could not yet precisely quantify the damage but estimated tens of thousands of euros in losses for a smaller store and as much as €200,000 for a large hypermarket. Intermarché's chief executive, Thierry Cotillard, called the attack "unprecedented" and warned that losses nationwide could reach tens of millions of euros in a single day. Witnesses in Paris described melted ice cream and other spoiled stock being dumped outside at least one Intermarché location.
This incident underlines the importance of resilience across the entire supply chain.
Christel Delberghe, Eurocommerce
Prime Minister Lecornu has ordered ANSSI to lead the investigation, and French authorities are now coordinating with counterparts elsewhere in Europe and assessing whether other companies using the same equipment remain at risk. The French retail federation FCD has called on Danfoss for "full transparency" about the scope of the flaw, while saying some affected stores have already restored normal operations. The episode echoes a smaller wave of disruptions at roughly a dozen U.S. military commissaries in late August that also triggered food losses, underscoring how a single vulnerable piece of industrial hardware can ripple across an entire sector.
