{"id":823536,"date":"2026-11-04T05:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T05:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/823536\/"},"modified":"2026-11-04T05:00:09","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T05:00:09","slug":"eu-urges-action-as-germany-romania-and-uk-report-supermarket-cyberattacks-european-union-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/823536\/","title":{"rendered":"EU urges action as Germany, Romania and UK report supermarket cyberattacks | European Union News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hackers raised the temperatures of refrigeration systems at supermarkets in Germany, Romania and the United Kingdom during Monday\u2019s cyberattacks<\/a>, officials said, bringing the number of European countries affected in the hacking spree to at least 11.<\/p>\n

The announcements on Tuesday came as the European Union promised a collective response, warning that the attacks, which have spoiled tonnes of food across the continent, were \u201cnot isolated\u201d.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

The motive for the cyberattacks is unknown, and no one has claimed responsibility. A Romanian official said he did not suspect a state actor.<\/p>\n

Problems were reported in at least nine EU countries on Monday: Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden. On Tuesday, officials and company representatives said four supermarkets in Germany and six in Romania were affected.<\/p>\n

The UK, which is not in the EU, was also hit.<\/p>\n

Thomas Regnier, a spokesperson for the EU, said the bloc\u2019s agencies were talking with national authorities to develop a joint response.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are not isolated incidents, and of course, we have to be collectively resilient and prepared for such cyber incidents,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But he refused to point the finger at any potential culprits.<\/p>\n

No state actor<\/p>\n

Romania\u2019s top cybersecurity official played down the threat.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems semi-amateurish,\u201d Dan Cimpean, the director of Romania\u2019s National Cyber Security Directorate, told the AFP news agency. \u201cWe do not suspect, under any circumstances, that it is a state actor.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added that \u201cno other infrastructure was compromised\u201d.<\/p>\n

Belgium was among the hardest-hit countries on Monday, with dozens of stores across several grocery chains reporting refrigeration failures. Federal prosecutors there have opened an investigation.<\/p>\n

In Italy, about 20 supermarkets were affected.<\/p>\n

Giuseppe Spadaro, director of a group that runs Coop supermarkets in Sicily, said four of its 300 stores were hit, causing thousands of euros in damage.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had to throw away everything. The shelves are empty,\u201d he told Italy\u2019s Corriere della Sera newspaper.<\/p>\n

Italy\u2019s government held talks with the heads of the intelligence services and the National Cybersecurity Agency on Tuesday after the attacks, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni\u2019s office said the incident had a \u201climited\u201d impact.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no cause for alarm, although all the relevant institutional bodies remain on high alert,\u201d it said in a statement.<\/p>\n

In the UK, hackers tried to target small meat-processing firms, but the impact was minimal, said Richard Horne, chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).<\/p>\n

Horne told the BBC the issue affected \u201cthe whole food supply chain\u201d, and that there had been a couple of instances where \u201cvulnerable technology had been exploited\u201d.<\/p>\n

The second wave of attacks mirrored the cyberattack that swept hundreds<\/a> of supermarkets across France in October, which also affected stores in several other European countries.<\/p>\n

In Sweden, the supermarket chain Coop said that refrigerators and freezers affected overnight at seven of its stores had been connected to \u201cold 4G networks\u201d, and that the stores had since resumed normal operations.<\/p>\n

Carlos Cancinos, a spokesperson for the chain, said Coop had accelerated an upgrade, begun after the October attacks, to move its connected refrigeration equipment onto 5G networks and modern modems.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis helps to solve a large share of problems of this kind,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Danfoss, a Danish maker of refrigeration controls whose systems were again among those targeted, said it had been in close contact with customers for the past three weeks. It recommended that the systems not be directly accessible from the internet.<\/p>\n

Frank Groenewegen, a cybersecurity expert at Deloitte in The Hague, urged retailers to check whether their refrigeration controllers were connected to the internet and running the latest security updates.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd if they don\u2019t even know, then remove them from the public internet immediately,\u201d he told the Reuters news agency. \u201cWith disconnecting, you haven\u2019t fixed the root cause, but you\u2019ve at least isolated those systems so that an attacker is not able to do this anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hackers raised the temperatures of refrigeration systems at supermarkets in Germany, Romania and the United Kingdom during Monday\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":823537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11182,2476,591,935,1991,59,145,57,58,464,50,30410,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-823536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-cybercrime","tag-cybersecurity","tag-europe","tag-european-union","tag-food","tag-gb","tag-germany","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-infrastructure","tag-news","tag-romania","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/823537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}