Suspected hacker attack on supermarkets in Sweden, Estonia and Belgium: freezer at 50°

Belgium, Sweden and Estonia. Three different countries appear to have suffered a hacker attack on the refrigeration systems of some supermarket chains very similar to that suffered by France, Belgium itself and the Netherlands a few weeks earlier. The temperatures of refrigerators and freezers have risen to 50 degrees above zero, making large quantities of preservative food unusable and suggesting the action of computer pirates.

Shops hit in Sweden

"We're emptying the freezers right now, there's not much else we can do," said Dennis Vidal, the manager of one of the shops in southern Sweden affected by the problem. "They are starting to cool down again, but everything is already ruined," he added, interviewed by public television, Svt. Some supermarkets of the ICA and Coop chains remained closed in the early hours of the morning of November 2 to manage the crisis, but there is still no official confirmation of the cause but a hacker attack is feared: "We are aware of the fact that a limited number of stores were affected by an incident that occurred during the night which compromised the refrigeration and freezing systems of the points of sale," said Gustaf Nilsson, spokesperson for the ICA Group supermarkets, reported by the TT news agency.

Entirely similar dynamics in Belgium, where the Delhaize supermarket chain confirmed that a "cyber incident" occurred during the night in around forty stores, compromising the refrigeration and freezing systems. According to RTL Info, several store managers received a message from Delhaize around 4am informing them of the rising temperatures in their refrigerated cabinets. Several shops reported the same problem: temperatures in refrigerators, but especially in freezers, suddenly increased to around 15 degrees Celsius. This situation is reminiscent of the large-scale cyberattack that targeted supermarket refrigeration systems in France, Belgium and the Netherlands in mid-October. Around 150 stores were affected at the time.