Refrigeration systems at three regional blood banks in France were hit by a cyberattack overnight between Sunday and Monday, at the same time as hackers tampered with supermarket freezers across Europe. No blood stock was lost.
“Several regional facilities of the French Blood Establishment (EFS) were affected by a cybersecurity incident that impacted certain cold storage room monitoring and control systems,” the French health ministry said in a statement reported by Reuters and carried by the Daily Mirror.
EFS spokesperson Charley Dubois said the incident had no effect on blood supplies. “We have staff round the clock since blood can be needed at any time,” she said. “They were warned about the problems by alerts and moved the blood to other refrigerators that were not connected.”
Hiru News, citing Associated Press reporting, said the attackers had attempted to drive the temperature of stored blood products and samples sharply upwards, and that French authorities intervened before damage occurred.
The health ministry said the situation was under control by Wednesday and that remote access to the affected refrigerators had been disabled. Investigations are continuing into how the attack was carried out, what equipment was affected and when systems can safely return to service.
Part of a wider wave
The blood bank intrusion coincided with an attack that tampered with refrigeration at supermarkets across Europe, forcing retailers to discard large quantities of food. Reuters put the number of countries affected at eight; earlier reporting on the same wave, including our coverage of the supermarket attacks, counted seven.
It followed an incident in France last month in which police said hackers seized control of cooling units at hundreds of supermarkets, causing fires and food losses.
The attacks have sharpened concern in the European Union about unrecognised vulnerabilities in connected infrastructure, amid heightened security tensions since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
