What Do We Know About the Cyberattack on French Supermarket Refrigerators—and what about World Food

A silent, overnight assault on the cold chain. Fires, spoiled meat, melted ice cream on the pavement. And a question that suddenly feels less hypothetical: how fragile is the food on our plates?

Welcome back to the C WEB podcast. Today we turn to a story that sounds like science fiction but unfolded in real time across France this week: a coordinated cyberattack that turned supermarket refrigerators and freezers into instruments of destruction. Not by stealing data. Not by demanding ransom. But by quietly, remotely, raising the temperature of the cold chain that keeps our food safe—and watching it spoil.

On the night of October 11 into October 12, hackers targeted connected refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets. The temperatures were pushed as high as 50 degrees Celsius—122 degrees Fahrenheit—and held there for hours. The result was immediate and visceral: fires broke out in some stores, and tons of fresh and frozen food had to be discarded.

The Paris prosecutor's office described it as a "large-scale" attack affecting "connected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France." Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu instructed France's National Cybersecurity Agency, ANSSI, to investigate.

Analysts at Sekoia Threat Detection and Research say Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany, and Belgium have also been affected. Carrefour reported that 80 of its supermarkets were hit. Monoprix said about 5 percent of its roughly 490 stores were affected. Les Mousquetaires, which owns Intermarché, said fridges at approximately 150 of its stores were heated to 50 degrees Celsius overnight for six hours. Staff discarded all affected food to eliminate health risks.

A Paris resident witnessed the aftermath at an Intermarché in central Paris: staff throwing cartfuls of defrosted frozen food into a giant trash container, with molten ice cream sloshing out of broken tubs onto the street.

Dominique Schelcher, CEO of the Cooperative U supermarket group, called it an attack on "equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products and to the food supply of the French people." He described it as "of extreme gravity" and "unprecedented."

Thierry Cotillard, CEO of Intermarché, told French media the attack would cause losses of "tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day."

So how did this happen? Modern supermarkets don't manage cold aisles with someone walking around with a clipboard. They run on control panels that manage an entire store's fridges and freezers—and those panels are often accessible over the internet, allowing maintenance companies to adjust them remotely.

ANSSI identified a vulnerability in software supplied by Danfoss, a Danish engineering company whose refrigeration controllers are widely used across Europe. Danfoss said it was aware of incidents affecting a limited number of refrigeration management systems. The affected units, the company said, "were running outdated firmware." Danfoss added that it had "long advised customers to keep supported systems updated with the latest firmware and to migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions."

In August, cybersecurity firm Claroty's Team82 published research detailing vulnerabilities in the Danfoss AK-SM 800A controller. According to that report, Danfoss software updates addressed issues that could have allowed attackers to bypass authentication controls and execute code on compromised devices.

The attacks resemble disruptions reported at about a dozen US military commissaries in late August, where fridges were affected and food was lost.

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