Refrigeration outages hit European supermarkets in suspected hacking wave

Stephan Moelans, chief executive of the refrigeration installer Sabcobel, told Belgium's Belga News Agency on Monday that technicians had been mobilized overnight. "We began mobilizing technicians at 1 a.m. to get the situation under control," he said, adding that crews had worked "all night and morning to disconnect the affected units from the network."

The disruption follows the hacking of hundreds of French supermarkets last month, when the temperature of grocery store refrigerators and freezers was raised, spoiling food and causing small fires. Those attacks hit 80 Carrefour locations, about 24 Monoprix locations and 150 Intermarche locations, according to Fortune. In August, half a dozen US military commissaries suffered a similar refrigeration outage, and the Pentagon is now investigating both the French supermarket outages and the commissary outages as a potential cyberattack.

Moelans said the latest wave mirrored the French incidents and that hackers had left the same calling card. Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported similar outages at the chains ICA and Coop. One ICA store, ICA Kvantum Sjöbo, said in a Facebook post that its refrigerators and freezers had been hacked overnight and the temperature set to 50 degrees Celsius, or 122 degrees Fahrenheit, forcing it to throw out stored food. "We are extremely sorry to have to throw out all this food, but we see no other way," the store wrote. "Now we are focusing on getting everything back on track."

ICA told Fortune that the outages affected a limited number of stores using an external supplier whose networks sit outside ICA's main network, and that its central systems were unaffected. The European Commission said in a statement that the incident showed how much cyberattacks can "disrupt services, affect businesses and directly affect citizens' daily lives".

Cybersecurity experts said it was only a matter of time before refrigerators and freezers became targets for hackers. Nadiya Kostyuk, an assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology, told Fortune that as more appliances become internet-connected, they become more accessible to outside agents and more susceptible to potential network breaches. "A lot of these devices have a lot of really cool features, but the security is not the first priority for them," she said, expressing hope that future designs would build in more security and existing equipment would be revisited.

Christopher Whyte, an associate professor of homeland security and emergency preparedness at Virginia Commonwealth University, told Fortune that commercial chains tend to use the same refrigeration devices across sites, so a weak point in one can expose others. The immediate financial hit makes them a target: after the French attacks, Intermarché and E.Leclerc reported about 270,000 euros, or 300,000 dollars, in combined damages, according to the local news outlet Sud Ouest. "You can't unspoil food or other products from these freezers. It's just euros and dollars down the drain," Whyte said. He added that while there is no official proof the outages are connected, the proximity of the French and US incidents and the similarity of the systems affected made suspicion reasonable: "You'd be silly not to be suspicious."