Hacker attacks on refrigerators in recent hours have hit supermarkets in several European countries: serious anomalies have been reported in some stores of large-scale retail chains in Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, Estonia, Holland and Ireland. In the supermarkets involved, the freezers quickly turned into ovens and temperatures soared to 50 degrees above zero.
Similar incidents also occurred yesterday in some supermarkets in our country. In particular, the hacker attacks in Italy hit at least four Coop stores in Sicily: three in Catania and one in Palermo. The anomalies concerned the refrigeration systems of the food banks, which went haywire.
The attacks in Sicily, therefore, caused the temperature parameters to change, overheating the stalls and causing food spoilage. The postal police are checking for possible connections with what happened in other countries.
Meanwhile, Copasir has also moved in Italy. The Committee has made it known that it will ask the government for information on the matter and the topic will be on the table today, when the hearing of Bruno Valensise, director of AISI, is scheduled in San Macuto. On Wednesday it is the turn of Andrea Quacivi, director of the National Cybersecurity Agency.
The first outages, in the night between Sunday and Monday, affected Sweden. “We are emptying the freezers, there is not much else we can do,” commented Dennis Vidal, manager of one of the shops hit by the attacks in the south of the country, on Monday morning. "They are starting to cool down again but everything is already ruined," he added to public television Svt.
Among the most affected countries is also Belgium: here, supermarkets such as Delhaize, Carrefour, Intermarché and Spar reported "cyber incidents", in dozens of stores, both in Flanders and in Wallonia. The hackers, explained the affected chains, remotely activated the defrosting mode of the systems: in this way the temperatures of the refrigerators and freezers rose above the limits established by law.
The European Union also expressed its opinion on these episodes, defining the situation as "highly worrying". "This is a deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain and undermine consumer confidence - a warning we must take seriously," Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen said. "These episodes demonstrate that cyber attacks can interrupt services, have repercussions on businesses and directly impact the daily lives of citizens", a spokesperson for the European Commission then underlined. "The EU - he added - has various tools to respond to such episodes".
For the moment, no one has claimed responsibility for the attacks. And while investigations continue in all countries to find out who ordered the attacks, how they carried them out and to prevent them from happening again in the future, the extent of the damage has not yet been quantified: however, there are fears of tons of food being thrown away across half of Europe.
According to experts, however, there is little doubt about the coordinated nature of the incidents. "This is a cyberattack, there is no other explanation," Carrefour Belgium spokesman Mich Vergauwen said. Belgian industrial refrigeration group Sabcobel said it had started securing its plants after the October 12 attack in France, but added that around 10% of its machinery had not yet been overhauled and that some were in the affected stores. In several stores, according to initial reconstructions, those who were affected were the older systems (for example connected to the 4G network instead of 5G), less updated or insufficiently shielded. The theme of the update, therefore, would also be central in this case: already after the attack in France, the Danish manufacturer Danfoss had explained that the malfunctioning equipment, in most cases, was obsolete and now incapable of receiving "software or security updates".
