Police in Sweden's Syd region have been assigned to coordinate all police investigations into the suspected hacker attack that disabled freezers at grocery stores, SVT Skåne reports, according to Omni – Alla nyheter. Alla perspektiv. Each region is running its own inquiry, but Syd will map the reports and then deliver its findings to the National Operations Department (Noa).
The disruption became known on Monday, when several grocery chains raised the alarm after their freezers were suddenly set to 50 degrees. The stores were forced to throw away very large quantities of food. No suspect has been identified at this stage.
Why it matters
The assignment gives the scattered regional inquiries a single point of coordination at a time when the case spans multiple chains and several parts of the country. Mapping the reports is also a precondition for seeing the full scale of the incident: without a collected picture, it is difficult to tell how many stores were affected and whether the cases share a common pattern. For the stores, the immediate damage is measured in discarded food, but the episode also raises questions about how connected refrigeration equipment is protected.
A call to report rather than delete
Fredrik Nilsson, head of the regional IT crime centre in Syd, told SVT Skåne that it is important that no information is erased and that incidents are reported. His remark points to a practical problem in the early phase of an investigation: evidence that could help identify those responsible may sit in store systems or in the logs of individual outlets, and it can be lost if equipment is reset or records are cleared before police are notified.
The structure of the response reflects how the case has unfolded. Because the affected stores belong to different chains and fall under different police regions, no single unit was automatically in charge. The decision to let Syd compile and chart the reports, and then pass the result to Noa, creates a national overview without taking the individual investigations away from the regions that opened them.
What is known so far
The facts remain limited. The freezers were set to 50 degrees, a temperature far outside normal operation for frozen goods, and the change was sudden. Several grocery chains alerted authorities on Monday. The consequence was that stores had to dispose of large volumes of food. Police have not named a suspect, and no motive has been established.
Swedish media have treated the incident as a serious event. Dagens Nyheter published a column by Susanne Nyström describing an acute security threat behind the freezer attack. Expressen reported that the shortcomings were known before the attack on Ica. Sveriges Radio reported that the hacker attack on freezers and refrigerators is being investigated from Skåne. Nerikes Allehanda, for its part, advised readers not to connect devices unnecessarily.
Those reports frame the police work in a wider context, but they do not change the core of the official account: the investigation is at the stage of gathering and mapping reports, and the question of who was behind the disruption is still open.
For shoppers and store staff, the visible effect has been empty freezer cabinets and waste. For the investigation, the priority now is documentation. The coordination task given to Syd is essentially an accounting exercise — establishing how many reports exist, what they contain and where they overlap — before any broader assessment can be made.
What happens next depends on what the mapping shows. Syd will report its findings to Noa, and further steps will follow from that picture. Until then, the police appeal stands: report the incidents and preserve the information rather than deleting it.
