More grocery stores in Europe report fridge and freezer temperature spikes as apparent cyberattacks continue

Grocery store chains in at least three European countries reported unexpected temperature spikes Monday in refrigerators and freezers that ruined food — the second time in less than a month that similar incidents have raised concerns about cyberattacks on increasingly interlinked infrastructure.

Netherlands-based food retailer Ahold Delhaize and Colruyt in Belgium both said an IT incident overnight had sent temperatures inside fridges and freezers in dozens of their stores in Belgium and Luxembourg soaring, while Swedish chains ICA and Coop reported similar spikes, with one outlet explicitly blaming a cyberattack, according to the Reuters news agency.

The incidents come less than three weeks after several French supermarket chains said they were hit by a cyberattack that sent refrigerator temperatures surging as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit in hundreds of outlets.

French chains E. Leclerc, Intermarché and Cooperative U told the AFP news agency last month that they had suffered a cyberattack. 

On Monday, Reuters said Ahold, the Dutch grocery store chain, had reported a cybersecurity incident to police in the Netherlands in October after detecting suspicious activity in its infrastructure. The chain realized there were temperature increases in the cooling systems on Monday, Delhaize spokesperson Sarah De Meester told Reuters. 

The CEO of Belgian refrigeration company Sabcobel, which operates the systems used by Delhaize and other chains, told Belgium’s national Belga news agency a cyberattack was to blame after fridge and freezer units’ evaporators were switched into defrost mode.

“We began mobilizing technicians at 1 a.m. to get the situation under control,” Stephan Moelans told Belga. “We’ve been working all night and morning to disconnect the affected units from the network.” 

“Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working very hard to protect our customers’ fridges against this vulnerability,” he told the news agency, but he added that many units would require physical modifications, and “that requires investment.”  

A handful of Swedish supermarkets also saw refrigerator and freezer temperatures soar early Monday, two chains said, forcing them to throw away spoiled food. ICA and Coop both told AFP they had no immediate information about their systems being subjected to a cyberattack.

ICA told AFP “a limited number” of its stores were affected, but it did not provide a number. One of its stores, in Sjobo in southern Sweden, posted on Facebook that its fridges and freezers had “been hacked and they set the temperature at 50 degrees” Celsius (about 122 degrees Fahrenheit).

“We are looking into what has happened and the scale of it,” spokesperson Helena Johansson told AFP, adding that the company was focusing on how to help affected stores.

The Coop chain said six of its around 800 stores in Sweden had problems with their fridges and freezers and had to throw out food, with company spokesman Carlos Cancino telling AFP that the units “either stopped working entirely or have been partially impaired.”

“I haven’t received any information that this is a cyberattack,” he said.

On Oct. 12, major French retailers said hundreds of stores were hit by a cyberattack on their refrigeration systems, which forced them to throw out food and raised concerns about food security. In that incident, refrigeration control systems from Danish manufacturer Danfoss were targeted.

There has been no claim of responsibility for any hack targeting grocery retailers in Europe to date.

Speaking after the French stores were forced to discard thousands of pounds of wasted food last month due to the still-unattributed hack, European Union food and agriculture commissioner Christophe Hansen said in a post on X that “food security requires more attention at all levels,” calling the “exploitation” of vulnerabilities in such essential, networked systems a new “reality.” 

“Targeting equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products and to the food supply of the French people is of extreme gravity and is unprecedented,” Cooperative U CEO Dominique Schelcher wrote on X last month.

Prosecutors in Paris confirmed a cyberattack and said it also hit other major chains and sparked fires as some equipment overheated.