Cyberattack Disrupts European Supermarket Fridges
A coordinated hacking attack on supermarket refrigeration systems spread across parts of Europe on Monday, raising temperatures in fridges and freezers at stores from Sweden to Belgium and Ireland and forcing retailers to discard spoiled food.
The incident affected chains including Ahold Delhaize and Colruyt in Belgium and Luxembourg, Swedish groups ICA and Coop, Carrefour outlets in Belgium, and at least one IKEA store, echoing a similar assault on French supermarkets last month.
At an ICA franchise in Stockholm, freezers reached 50 degrees Celsius after an overnight breach that staff only discovered hours later. Sales manager Engla Ingwall told Reuters that “everything is destroyed” and confirmed a cyberattack had elevated temperatures across the store’s freezers. ICA said a limited number of its stores were hit.
In Belgium, Colruyt reported five Spar franchise shops affected, while Carrefour said 15 of its roughly 700 Belgian stores suffered impacts. Irish wholesaler Musgrave removed chilled and frozen products from 13 SuperValu stores after monitoring systems flagged the problem. Swedish Coop confirmed seven of its 800 stores were compromised through unauthorised access to refrigeration controls.
Some of the targeted units relied on temperature-control technology from Danish firm Danfoss, which was also implicated in the French attack last month when hackers took over cooling systems at hundreds of stores, causing fires and substantial food losses. Danfoss said it was working with customers on fixes.
Belgian butcher Luc De Laet, whose store south of Antwerp was hit, estimated €15,000 in ruined meat after fridges climbed as high as 18 degrees. “It’s very scary,” he said. “They are hacking the system that is doing the registration of the temperature, and they can program it at a distance.” He described the episode as an attempt to destabilise European economies and urged authorities to respond.
No group has claimed responsibility. Belgium’s Centre for Cybersecurity spokesperson Katrien Eggers said the perpetrator “is not known… and it may never be determined,” while expressing concern over the rising number of incidents and the role artificial intelligence can play in exploiting system weaknesses. EU Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen called the attacks “a deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain and undermine consumers’ confidence,” warning that their repeated occurrence was “deeply concerning.”
Cybersecurity researcher Tom Hegel of SentinelOne noted that the lack of ransom demands pointed more toward sabotage than extortion, and that retail networks of refrigeration controllers, building systems and point-of-sale equipment remain relatively easy targets that leave little forensic trace.
The events have heightened European worries about hybrid threats to civilian infrastructure amid ongoing security tensions linked to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Moscow has denied involvement in such operations.
