In some Coop stores, at least three in Catania and one in Palermo, hacker attacks on the refrigeration systems of food banks occurred. Giuseppe Spadaro, general director of the Radenza group, which manages Coop brand supermarkets, says this. The attack, he adds, led to the modification of temperature parameters, overheating the counters and causing food spoilage. The postal police is reconstructing the origin of the attacks and the extent and is verifying whether or not there are links with what happened in other European countries. The attack took place at 4 in the morning - adds Spadaro - We are calculating the damage. In some cases we have solved it. We have already contacted the National Cybersecurity Agency and activated the protocols to carry out in-depth investigations.
Tomorrow (Tuesday 3 November 2026) at 11.30 am, a meeting will be held at Palazzo Chigi, coordinated by the Undersecretary to the Prime Minister Alfredo Mantovano, to take stock of the wave of attacks. The Director of the National Cybersecurity Agency and the Directors of the Intelligence Agencies will participate.
The point in Europe at 18:40 (Italian time)
(by Mattia B. Bagnoli)
A common thread now connects the hacker attacks on supermarket refrigerators that are multiplying in Europe, following the model of what happened in France last October 12th. Now, if anything, it remains to understand where the investigations will lead, to find out who ordered them and how he acted, also to avoid new surprises in the future. Serious anomalies were reported - with freezers suddenly transformed into ovens, given the temperatures soaring to 50 degrees above zero - by large-scale retail chains in Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, Estonia, Holland and Ireland. A development that the European Union has described as "highly worrying". The outages started during the night, with the bitter discovery after the opening.
"We are emptying the freezers, there is not much else we can do," commented Dennis Vidal, 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 underlined on public television Svt. Given the extent of the damage, there are fears of tons of food being thrown away across half of Europe. In Belgium, giants such as Delhaize, Carrefour, Intermarché and Spar reported "cyber incidents" in dozens of stores, both in Flanders and Wallonia. The hackers, also in this case, remotely activated the defrost mode of the systems, causing the temperature of the refrigerators and freezers to rise above the limits set by law. The Belgian federal prosecutor's office launched an investigation but did not provide further details.
For its part, the Belgian Cyber Security Center (CCB) has expressed concern about the increase in the number of incidents, due in particular to the targeted use of artificial intelligence (AI), a trend that has accelerated in the last six months. "This is a deliberate attempt to interrupt our food supply chain and undermine consumer confidence: a warning that we must take seriously", highlighted the Commissioner for Agriculture, Christophe Hansen, ensuring that he will raise the "issue with my fellow commissioners at our next meeting" of the college. "These incidents demonstrate that cyber attacks can disrupt services, have repercussions on businesses and directly impact the daily lives of citizens," remarked a spokesperson for the European Commission. "The EU - he recalled - has various tools to respond to such episodes". However, at the moment, no one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, although there is little doubt about the coordinated nature of the incidents.
"This is a cyberattack, there is no other explanation", assured Carrefour Belgium spokesperson Mich Vergauwen (the disruptions occurred in around fifteen of the chain's 700 stores in the country). The Belgian industrial refrigeration group Sabcobel specified that it had begun to secure its plants after the October 12 attack in France but that around 10% of the machinery had not yet been overhauled and that some were located in the affected shops. According to an initial assessment, if we cross-reference the data, the issue of updating emerges as crucial, since the systems targeted appear to be older ones - for example connected to the 4G network instead of the more modern 5G - or not sufficiently shielded. Following the attack in France, the Danish manufacturer Danfoss had not surprisingly explained that the malfunctioning equipment, in most cases, were obsolete products no longer capable of receiving "software or security updates".
