STOCKHOLM/BRUSSELS/LONDON (Reuters) – European supermarket fridges are under cyberattack once again, with stores across a vast swathe of the continent from Sweden to Belgium hit by a hack on Monday that turned up their temperatures, echoing an incident in France just last month.
Supermarket chains Ahold Delhaize (AD.AS), and Colruyt (COLR.BR), said an IT incident overnight hit fridges and freezers in dozens of stores in Belgium and Luxembourg, while Swedish grocers ICA and Coop reported similar temperature spikes.
“There has been a cyberattack and all our freezers reached 50 degrees (Celsius),” Engla Ingwall, sales manager at an ICA franchise store in Stockholm, told Reuters, adding the attack occurred at 2 a.m. (0100 GMT) but was only noticed hours later.
“Everything is destroyed.”
A spokesperson at privately held ICA said in an emailed statement that the company was aware that 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. Ahold also reported a cybersecurity incident to police last month.
While no-one has claimed responsibility for either attack, the cases have put a spotlight on rising anxiety among regional authorities over hybrid attacks spreading from conflicts on European borders after Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine.
Moscow has repeatedly denied involvement in any sabotage or hybrid warfare operations. 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 national cybersecurity centre – which said it could not speculate on who was behind the attacks – is working on several incidents affecting grocery stores across the country, the head of the centre, John Billow, said on Monday.
“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.
