Electronic attacks confuse European stores...and the European Union warns against targeting food security

The European Union warned of a growing threat targeting food supply chains, after the refrigeration systems in hundreds of European stores were exposed to sudden disturbances that led to temperatures rising inside refrigerators and freezers and the destruction of quantities of food. Authorities and retailers suspect these incidents were caused by coordinated cyberattacks similar to those that struck France last month.

European Union Commissioner for Food and Agriculture Christoph Hansen said that Brussels takes these incidents “very seriously,” describing the repeated attacks as “deeply worrying.”

Nine countries are affected, and Belgium is in the lead

The unrest extended to at least nine European countries: Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal and Italy.

The largest disturbances were concentrated in Belgium, where the authorities opened an investigation to find out the causes of the incidents, without officially confirming that an electronic hack had occurred.

But the affected companies did not express any doubts. The Carrefour chain confirmed that about 15 stores out of 700 were affected by the incident, while its spokesman, Mich Verguin, said: “It is a cyber attack... there is no other reason.”

IKEA Belgium also announced that one of its branches was subjected to an attack that led to a sudden rise in refrigerator temperatures during the dawn hours, while other chains such as Delhaize, Colruyt and Intermarche reported similar problems.

A common thread

Reports and specialized companies indicated that many of the affected systems were using old equipment or software that had not received security updates, making them more vulnerable to hacking.

Retail companies linked the recent incidents to a refrigeration control system provided by the Danish company Danfoss, which is the same system that was linked to a cyber attack targeting French stores last October.

Danfoss did not issue a comment on the new accusations, but it had previously explained that most of the devices affected by the French attack belong to old models that no longer receive software or security updates.

Specialists said that the recurrence of incidents in several countries in recent months makes it expected that they would spread to other European markets, in light of the rapid increase in exploitation of technical vulnerabilities.

Warnings of the expanding threat

In Italy, the National Cybersecurity Agency received reports of incidents targeting companies operating in the food and catering sector, and called on institutions to review remote control systems and isolate them from the Internet as much as possible.