A cyber-attack has disrupted refrigerators and freezers at supermarkets in seven European countries, the BBC reported on Monday. Roughly 40 Delhaize stores in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected, alongside a smaller number of shops in Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland.
Sabcobel, the Belgian manufacturer behind some of the affected units, said the equipment's evaporators were moved into defrost mode, which caused temperatures to climb. The company believes the technique matches the one used in an incident that struck hundreds of French supermarkets last month, according to the BBC.
Why it matters
The attack shows how deeply everyday retail infrastructure now depends on network connections. Most supermarkets across Europe keep their refrigeration online so maintenance staff can troubleshoot remotely, and that convenience becomes a liability when the same link can be turned against the equipment. In October, local media reported that millions of euros of food had to be discarded after the French incident.
Stephan Moelans, chief executive of Sabcobel, which runs Delhaize's systems, told the Belga news agency on Monday that the event was a cyber-attack. He said his teams had spent the night and the following morning cutting the compromised units off from the network. Since the French disruption in early October, the firm had been trying to shield customer fridges from the flaw, but he explained that the fix required physical changes to the hardware rather than software patches alone.
Moelans described remote, secure connections as the most straightforward safeguard, noting that most of his customers had adopted that setup after the French attack.
Losses mount as chains respond
Reports from across the continent described freezer temperatures climbing as high as 50C (122F) in some shops. In the Flemish town of Hoeilaart, a Delhaize branch told the Het Laatste Nieuws news site it had written off €100,000 (£83,500) of stock, a figure the manager said excluded the further cost of shutting the store.
Carrefour, the French-owned grocer, said 15 of its Belgian outlets were hit and that it acted immediately to keep every shop trading. Colruyt Group, which franchises Spar stores in Belgium, told Reuters that five locations had their cooling systems attacked. Ikea said the refrigeration at its store in the western Belgian city of Mons was affected, and a spokesman quoted by Reuters said further sites could not be ruled out.
In Sweden, ICA confirmed that a small number of stores running outside its central network were caught up in the incident and said it was helping them cope. A branch in Sjöbo, in the south of the country, posted on social media that its fridges and freezers had been hacked overnight and the temperature set to 50 degrees. Coop, which operates 800 stores in Sweden, told the BBC that seven were affected but that the situation was contained.
Finland's Kesko, owner of the K-store chain, said its security specialists were looking into the cause of malfunctions detected at some outlets, according to Helsingin Sanomat. In Ireland, 13 SuperValu supermarkets were impacted; a spokesman for owner Musgrave Group told The Irish Times that a cyber incident had hit its refrigeration systems but that the damage was confined to one particular fridge model.
Dutch public radio NOS quoted a Danfoss spokesperson saying the cooling systems of at least 17 companies in the Netherlands were attacked overnight, including butcher shops and small local stores. A Selver supermarket in Estonia was also affected, and ERR reported that other businesses in the country may be involved.
National authorities are watching closely. Cyber-security agencies in Belgium and Sweden both said they were tracking the incident. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre said it was cooperating with international partners and industry to establish the full details, and no incidents have been reported in Britain.
The BBC also reported that US authorities are investigating refrigeration failures at several American military bases in August and are working with French officials to determine whether those events are connected to the European campaign.
What to watch next: whether investigators tie the European outages and the earlier French and US incidents to a single actor, and how quickly retailers move their cooling systems onto secured connections.
