PARIS
Store managers arriving for work across France on Monday morning walked into warm air where the cold should have been. Overnight, hackers had seized control of connected refrigeration systems at hundreds of supermarkets and driven temperatures upward — in many units to 50 degrees Celsius, hot enough to thaw frozen stock, break the cold chain for fresh food, melt equipment in at least one reported case and start small fires in some locations. By sunrise, staff were wheeling cartloads of spoiled food to dumpsters and some stores simply stayed closed while the shelves were cleared.
The Paris prosecutor’s office described a large-scale attack affecting connected refrigerators at several major food retailers across France, leading to food losses and fires. It is, by every account from the industry itself, without precedent: not a theft of customer data or a ransom note on a head-office server, but a direct attack on the physical equipment a country uses to feed itself.
How the Attack Worked
According to reporting from Le Monde and BFM-TV, which first reported the incident, the attack was probably launched around 11 p.m. on Sunday and was only discovered at about 4 a.m., when a delivery driver found a flooded storeroom at one store: the heat in the cold room had reached 50 degrees and set off a sprinkler. The method was cruelly simple. The attackers raised the temperature of the defrosting system in freezers and cold-storage rooms and extended the defrost cycle from its normal one hour to eight hours, so alarms would sound later and the damage would have longer to build.
Later reporting linked the vulnerable systems to older refrigeration control models whose security software could not be updated against a risk that had already been identified. That detail matters beyond France: modern supermarkets run their cold chains on remotely managed, internet-connected controllers, and a fleet of aging units that cannot be patched is a standing invitation. One Normandy store reported on social media that some of its equipment had melted as temperatures climbed far above the 50-degree mark reported elsewhere.
The Scale of the Damage
The numbers grew through the day as each chain counted its own stores. Les Mousquetaires, the group behind Intermarché and Netto, said fridges at around 150 of its stores were heated for six hours at first count, with the wider group toll reported at about 300 stores. Coopérative U put its figure at about 100 stores. Carrefour said 80 of its supermarkets were hit, Monoprix said about 5 percent of its stores — roughly 30 — were affected, and members of the E.Leclerc network were also struck. Put together, estimates put the total near 500 stores out of roughly 15,000 in France.
Because food that has left the cold chain cannot safely be sold, affected stores discarded everything in the compromised units. One Intermarché owner in southwestern France told Le Monde a bailiff had confirmed a loss of 21,000 euros at purchase price in his store alone, and two stores in Alsace were reported to have lost 270,000 euros between them. National losses are expected to reach into the millions of euros. Some stores, including one in Haguenau in eastern France, remained closed for the morning while staff cleared shelves. In central Paris, shoppers watched staff throw defrosted frozen food into a large trash container in the street.
An Attack on the Food Supply Itself
The official reaction reflected how seriously Paris is treating an attack on food infrastructure. The prime minister instructed ANSSI, France’s national cybersecurity agency, to investigate, and a person in his office said France was coordinating with European counterparts because other countries could also be affected, while authorities assessed whether other French companies were at risk. A senior analyst at the French threat-intelligence firm Sekoia said Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium had also been affected, though the full European picture was still emerging on Monday.
Coopérative U’s chief executive, Dominique Schelcher, called targeting equipment essential to preserving fresh food and supplying the French people a matter of extreme gravity and unprecedented. The European food commissioner likewise condemned the hack. No group had claimed responsibility and no demands had been made as of Monday, which leaves investigators with the hardest kind of case: an attack whose motive is not yet visible, carried out against soft, widely distributed infrastructure that every country in Europe shares.
What Happens Next
For shoppers, the immediate impact is local and practical: closed aisles, empty freezers and stores that reopen with thin stock while deliveries catch up. For the industry, the questions are structural. How many more connected controllers in stores, warehouses and trucks share the same unpatchable weakness? How quickly can retailers inventory and replace them? And how should food retailers — long treated as a low-risk sector by security teams focused on banks and energy grids — reclassify themselves now that their refrigeration has been demonstrated, in one night, as an attack surface?
French prosecutors and ANSSI will produce the forensic answers in the coming days. The commercial answer may move faster: after Monday morning, no supermarket executive in Europe needs the concept of a freezer hack explained twice.
More world news and the rest of the night’s stories are on the Previously news front.
