Hackers heated supermarket freezers to 50C, spoiling millions of euros of French food

Attackers took over remote fridge controls

According to the BBC, hundreds of French supermarkets were hit by a cyber attack that pushed fridges and freezers to heat up, spoiling fresh and frozen food estimated to be worth millions of euros. The attackers gained control of software that regulates refrigeration temperatures and ordered some units to warm to 50C (120F) and remain hot overnight.

The affected software comes from Danish engineering firm Danfoss and is used by retailers to manage cold units remotely. Supermarket freezers normally run a short defrost cycle overnight, during which temperatures rise slightly. In this incident the units were instead instructed to heat up and stay hot, in some cases for six hours straight.

Roughly 500 stores affected

Figures supplied by the individual chains suggest about 500 stores were hit out of roughly 15,000 supermarkets in France, the BBC reports. Coopérative U said more than 100 of its supermarkets were targeted, with chief executive Dominique Schelcher describing the incident as extremely serious and without precedent. At least 300 stores belonging to Intermarché and its Netto brand were affected, according to AFP. Carrefour said fridges in 80 of its 6,000 stores were hacked, Monoprix reported around 5% of its more than 400 stores were hit, and E.Leclerc was also affected.

Intermarché told Reuters its fridges had been held at 50C for six hours overnight into Monday, and that all affected food was thrown away to avoid health risks. Mousquetaires Group, which owns Intermarché and Netto, said some fresh and frozen display units were still out of service on Monday afternoon and that products from those units had been removed while staff worked to restock shelves.

Managers arriving at branches of several chains on Monday morning were met with waves of hot air from the freezers, and the BBC reports small fires broke out in some locations. French broadcaster BFMTV published a photo of a freezer in an ice cream aisle showing a temperature of 26.5C.

Losses could reach into the millions

Two supermarkets in the Alsace region reported €270,000 (£228,000) in losses between them, according to BFMTV. With hundreds of stores discarding stock, the nationwide total is expected to run into the millions of euros, although the BBC notes the full scale of the attack is still unclear.

Older units could not be patched

Danfoss said the affected cold units were older models whose security software could not be updated to defend against a risk the company had already identified. That detail points to a familiar industrial-control problem: equipment that reaches end of life without a patch path often stays deployed, and remote management features make it reachable by attackers.

Prosecutors open an investigation

The Paris prosecutor's office has opened a dedicated cyber-crime investigation, describing a large-scale attack on the refrigerators of several major food retail chains across France. European Food Commissioner Christophe Hansen condemned the hack, saying food security requires more attention at every level and that "the weaponisation of food has become a reality". Schelcher called for a full investigation, said targeting equipment essential to the French food supply was unacceptable, and added that staff were working with refrigeration specialists to restore normal operations.

Why it matters

The incident is a concrete example of operational technology being weaponised against civilian infrastructure. Refrigeration controllers are mundane, commodity systems, but once they are networked for remote management they become an attack surface with physical consequences: destroyed inventory, potential fires and disruption to the food supply. The fact that the vulnerable units were older models that could not receive security updates highlights the gap between IT patching norms and long-lived industrial hardware, where a fix may simply not exist. For retailers and regulators, it raises hard questions about how cold-chain equipment is monitored, segmented from untrusted networks and eventually retired — and whether attacks aimed at food infrastructure should be treated as a distinct class of threat.