European supermarket fridges have been hijacked by cyber hackers, with dozens of stores across the continent from Sweden to Belgium affected, echoing an incident in France last month.
Supermarket chains Ahold Delhaize and Colruyt said an IT incident hit fridges and freezers in dozens of stores in Belgium and Luxembourg Sunday night local time, while Swedish grocers ICA and Coop reported similar temperature spikes.
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“There has been a cyberattack and all our freezers reached 50C,” Engla Ingwall, sales manager at an ICA franchise store in Stockholm, told Reuters, adding the attack occurred at 2am on November 2, but was only noticed hours later.
A spokesperson at privately held ICA said in an emailed statement that the company was aware a “limited number of stores were affected by an incident overnight, which impacted their refrigeration and freezer systems”.
The latest incidents follow an attack in France last month in which police said hackers seized control of cooling units at hundreds of supermarkets, causing fires and food losses.
Reuters was unable to establish who was behind Monday’s attacks or if there was any link to the October ones in France.
Sweden’s cybersecurity centre said it could not speculate on who was behind the attacks, but is working on several incidents affecting grocery stores across the country, the head of the centre John Billow said.
“We have in recent weeks … identified we have quite a lot of exposed operational technology devices in Sweden that we have been clear about the necessity to update or patch,” he said.
Authorities urged to act
Luc De Laet, founder and owner of Belgian butchery chain De Laet & Van Haver, said he was woken at 3.30am by an employee telling him there was a problem.
He rushed to his store in Hove, south of Antwerp, and found the fridges turned up as high as 18 degrees.
He said it had ruined about 15,000 euro ($A24,000) worth of meat.
“It’s very scary. They are hacking the system that is doing the registration of the temperature, and they can program it at a distance,” he told Reuters, adding it made him angry having to throw away so much food.
De Laet said he felt the hackers were trying to destabilise European economies, adding that he had contacted police but did not know if there was an investigation.
“I only have two words for them: wake up, please, because there’s something going on,” he said.
A new world of opportunity for hackers
From refrigerators and heating systems to security cameras and alarm networks, an expanding range of devices once largely mechanical can now be monitored and controlled remotely, creating new opportunities for cybercriminals.
Stephan Moelans, chief executive of Belgian refrigeration firm Sabcobel, which operates Delhaize’s systems, told the Belga news agency the incident was a cyberattack, with units’ evaporators switched to defrost mode.
“We’ve been working all night and morning to disconnect the affected units from the network,” Moelans told Belga.
In the Netherlands, at least 17 smaller shops were affected, according to the refrigeration technology company Danfoss.
A spokesperson for Colruyt Group, which operates Spar stores in Belgium under a franchise system, said five shops had their fridge systems attacked.
In Ireland, food wholesaler Musgrave said that a cyber incident had affected refrigeration systems in 13 of its SuperValu stores, forcing it to remove some chilled and frozen products from sale.
Privately held grocery retail group Coop told Swedish daily Aftonbladet that six of its stores had been affected by similar incidents.
Carrefour said 15 stores out of its 700 in Belgium were affected.
An Estonian supermarket chain was also affected, with temperatures set to 50 degrees, technology supplier Kitman Coldtech told public broadcaster ERR.
with DPA
