Italy holds emergency talks as supermarket fridge attacks spread across Europe

Italy’s government held emergency talks with intelligence chiefs on Tuesday after cyberattacks on supermarket freezer systems hit at least 11 European countries in recent days.

Supermarkets in at least 10 EU countries, including Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, have been forced to throw away food after temperatures rose in their fridges and freezers. The UK has also been affected.

Nobody has claimed responsibility and the motive remains unknown.

The Italian government said the impact so far was “highly limited”, and that only outlets with outdated security systems had been affected. Around 20 stores were reported hit nationwide.

Ministers nevertheless met intelligence chiefs and Italy’s National Cyber Security Agency, which issued technical advice to retailers on protecting their systems.

Giuseppe Spadaro, director of a group that runs Coop supermarkets in Sicily, said four of its 300 stores had been hit. “We had to throw away everything. The shelves are empty,” he told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

EU spokesperson Thomas Regnier said EU agencies were working with national authorities on a collective response. “These are not isolated incidents, and of course, we have to be collectively resilient and prepared for such cyber incidents,” he said.

On Monday, EU food and agriculture commissioner Christophe Hansen called the attacks a “deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain”.

Romania’s cybersecurity chief took a different view. Six Romanian outlets were affected, but Dan Cimpean, director of the country’s National Cyber Security Directorate, said: “It seems semi-amateurish. We do not suspect, under any circumstances, that it is a state actor.”

In the UK, National Cyber Security Centre chief Richard Horne told the BBC the issue affected “the whole food supply chain”, and that there had been a couple of instances where “vulnerable technology had been exploited”.

Four stores were hit in Germany. In Sweden, the Coop chain said its seven affected shops were back to normal, and that the equipment involved had been connected over old 4G mobile networks.

Belgium was among the hardest-hit countries, and federal prosecutors there have opened an investigation. Hundreds of French supermarkets were hit by a similar attack last month.

Supermarket refrigeration systems are often connected to the internet so that contractors can monitor and repair them remotely. Recent research by the security firm Forescout found nearly 13,000 refrigeration control services openly reachable online in 99 countries