A cyberattack on refrigeration systems at hundreds of supermarkets in France has raised the temperature of fridges and freezers to as high as 50 degrees Celsius (122F), spoiling food and causing fires at several stores.<\/p>\n
Top retailers Intermarche, Cooperative U, E Leclerc and others confirmed the \u201cunprecedented\u201d cyberattack on Monday.<\/p>\n
Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n
At least 300 shops of Intermarche or its Netto brand were targeted, along with more than 100 Cooperative U outlets, the retailers told the AFP news agency.<\/p>\n
Carrefour said 80 supermarkets were affected, while Monoprix said about 5 percent of its roughly 490 stores were hit. E Leclerc said several of its stores were targeted.<\/p>\n
The Paris prosecutor\u2019s office said the \u201clarge-scale\u201d \u2060attack had affected \u201cconnected refrigerators in several major food retailers across France\u201d. It led to food losses and fires, the office said.<\/p>\n
The attack prompted Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu to order France\u2019s National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) to investigate, a person in his office told the Reuters news agency.<\/p>\n
The source said\u00a0France was coordinating with European counterparts because other countries could also be affected, adding that authorities were assessing whether other French companies were at risk.<\/p>\n
\u2018Unprecedented\u2019 attack<\/p>\n
There was no immediate estimate of industry-wide losses, but Intermarche CEO Thierry Cotillard told BFM TV the \u201cunprecedented\u201d attack would represent losses amounting to \u201ctens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day\u201d.<\/p>\n
According to BFM TV, the hackers \u201cmanaged to remotely trigger the forced defrosting of the refrigeration systems in numerous stores\u201d. The action resulted in the \u201cdestruction of stocks of fresh and frozen products\u201d, it said.<\/p>\n
Intermarche told AFP that affected stores would have to \u201cthrow away all of the products\u201d that were fresh or frozen.<\/p>\n
Dominique Schelcher, chief executive of Cooperative U, said the attack had disrupted refrigeration systems since Sunday night.<\/p>\n
\u201cTargeting equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products and to the food supply of the French people is extremely serious and is unprecedented. It is unacceptable,\u201d he wrote on X.<\/p>\n
He said the company\u2019s teams were working to restore normal operations as quickly as possible, and that an investigation would be needed to \u201cshed full light on this attack\u201d.<\/p>\n
Supermarket cold aisles are typically run by control \u2060panels that manage an entire store\u2019s fridges and freezers and can be accessed over the internet, which lets maintenance companies adjust them from anywhere.<\/p>\n
The \u2060source close to Lecornu said ANSSI had identified a vulnerability in software supplied by Danish company Danfoss.<\/p>\n
Danfoss said it was \u201caware of incidents in France affecting a limited number of refrigeration management systems\u201d.<\/p>\n
The affected units \u201cwere running outdated firmware\u201d, the company said, adding that it had \u201clong advised customers\u201d to keep their systems updated and replace older equipment.<\/p>\n
\u2018A global wake-up call\u2019<\/p>\n
The attack came after\u00a0cybersecurity firm Claroty published research on August 9 describing vulnerabilities in Danfoss systems that could allow attackers to bypass authentication.<\/p>\n
France\u2019s retail federation, known as the FCD, called on Danfoss to provide \u201cfull transparency\u201d.<\/p>\n
It said some affected stores were already operating again.<\/p>\n
Felix \u2060Aime, a senior cyberthreat intelligence analyst at Sekoia Threat Detection and Research, told Reuters that Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium had also been affected.<\/p>\n
Steven Lachance, a cybersecurity analyst, told Al Jazeera the attack was not unprecedented, though it was rare in its scale. He said that once a vulnerability is found in internet-connected equipment, cyber-attackers can log in remotely and trigger its features.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have connected infrastructure that is live on the internet, and that can be hacked. It\u2019s a new reality,\u201d he said, describing the attack as \u201ca global wake-up call\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe absolutely need national and international measures to prevent these attacks, because otherwise it\u2019s just going to keep happening,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
While retailers had lost millions of euros in food, the next target could be worse, Lachance warned. \u201cIt could target energy infrastructure or hospitals,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A cyberattack on refrigeration systems at hundreds of supermarkets in France has raised the temperature of fridges and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":931289,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48,19950,283,8267,3456,6816,637,28461,44,6578],"class_list":["post-931288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cybercrime","tag-cybersecurity","tag-denmark","tag-europe","tag-european-union","tag-france","tag-investigation","tag-news","tag-retail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/931289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}