Supermarkets across seven European countries lost large quantities of chilled and frozen stock after a cyberattack remotely switched refrigeration units into defrost mode, driving internal temperatures as high as 50C (122F).
The attack ran overnight between Sunday and Monday. Around 40 stores of the Belgian chain Delhaize were seriously affected, with outlets in Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia, Finland and Luxembourg also hit, Hiru News reported, citing the BBC.
Stephan Moelans, chief executive of the Belgian refrigeration firm Sabcobel, said the units’ evaporators had been switched into defrost mode. In Estonia, Kitman Coldtech chief executive Jann Mutso confirmed affected systems there reached 50C, Al Jazeera reported.
Scale of the losses
A single Delhaize store in Flanders, Belgium is estimated to have lost about €100,000 of stock. Fifteen Carrefour outlets and five Spar outlets were also affected. In Sweden, freezers at ICA and Coop stores were tampered with, forcing some shops to close temporarily; Al Jazeera additionally names the Swedish group Axfood and Ireland’s SuperValu among those hit.
Once the attack was identified, equipment makers and store operators disconnected the affected refrigeration systems from the network.
A repeat of the French attack
The same method was used in an October attack on hundreds of French supermarkets, which destroyed millions of euros of food and, according to Al Jazeera, caused fires at several stores.
No one has claimed responsibility for either attack. National cyber security agencies in Belgium, Sweden and the United Kingdom have opened investigations, and Dutch police have received a report from Ahold Delhaize. A Belgian cybersecurity spokesperson said authorities may never be able to identify who was behind it.
Not reported
Neither filing gives a total value for the destroyed stock across all seven countries, names the malware or access route used, or says whether the refrigeration systems shared a common supplier or remote-management platform. Hiru credits the BBC as its originating source; this desk cites the Al Jazeera report it was able to fetch and date directly rather than the BBC original.
One discrepancy is disclosed rather than resolved: some secondary coverage reports Belgian refrigerator temperatures reaching 70C. Both sources cited here give 50C, and that is the figure used above.
