Hackers took control of refrigeration systems at hundreds of French grocery stores Sunday night, cranking the heat up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, spoiling food, and reportedly sparking fires at several stores.
The attack targeted refrigeration systems made by Danish manufacturer Danfoss, hijacking software that lets retailers remotely manage their refrigerators and freezers. The systems normally undergo a short defrost cycle, but the hackers forced them to stay in that mode for several hours.
Managers arriving Monday at French grocery stores were met with a wave of hot air from the freezers, and several reported small fires, according to the BBC. Two supermarkets in eastern France alone reported about $302,000 in combined losses, according to French media reports.
Les Mousquetaires, which owns Intermarché, told CNBC that fridges at around 180 of its stores were affected, reaching 122 degrees Fahrenheit for about six hours overnight. Les Mousquetaires CEO Thierry Cotillard told BFM TV he expects nationwide losses to reach “tens of millions of euros.”
Huge losses for hundreds of French supermarkets after hackers increased the temperature to highs of 50c, causing tens of millions of euros in losses.
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In a statement to the AFP, Danfoss said almost all affected units were “legacy” products that “no longer receive software or security updates,” and that it had previously urged French grocery chains to upgrade these models for better security.
In August, cybersecurity firm Claroty published research detailing major vulnerabilities in Danfoss’s controller software that could let attackers bypass its login protections and compromise refrigeration systems. Claroty said Danfoss addressed the vulnerabilities in a firmware update. Neither French authorities nor Danfoss has linked those flaws to this week’s attack.
French prosecutors are investigating what they called a “large-scale” attack “affecting the refrigerators of several major food retail chains across France,” and France’s National Cybersecurity Agency has identified a vulnerability in Danfoss software, according to a source close to French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu.
Separately, cybersecurity companies have warned about artificial intelligence’s potential to enable attacks. The Daily Wire reported last year that suspected Chinese state-sponsored hackers manipulated Anthropic’s AI coding tool, Claude Code, to target roughly 30 organizations in what the company called “the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention.”
Anthropic warned in April that its Mythos model can outperform all but the most skilled hackers at finding and exploiting software flaws. The company said that, in the coming years, the challenge for companies and governments would shift from finding vulnerabilities to patching them before attackers using AI could exploit them.
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