Hackers warmed the refrigerators of hundreds of supermarkets to 50 degrees

Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has instructed France's National Cyber Security Agency (ANSSI) to investigate, a source in his department said.

France is coordinating with European partners as other countries could also be affected, the source said, adding that authorities were assessing whether other French companies were at risk.

Felix Eme, senior analyst for cyber threat analysis at Sekoia Threat Detection and Research, said Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium were also affected.

Carrefour said 80 of its supermarkets were affected, while Monoprix, which operates about 490 stores in France, said 5 percent of its stores were affected.

Les Mousquetaires, the owner of retail chain Intermarche, said refrigerators in about 150 of its stores were heated to 50°C for six hours a night. A company spokesman said all the products exposed were discarded to rule out health risks.

A resident of Paris Geert de Klerk witnessed how employees of the Intermarche store in central Paris threw whole carts of thawed frozen food into a giant dumpster, and melted ice cream splashed out of broken cans into the street, CNN reports.

Cooperative U CEO Dominic Shelcher said his supermarket group was also attacked. “The choice of equipment needed to preserve fresh produce and provide food for the French people is extremely important and unprecedented,” he wrote on Platform X.

There was no accurate assessment of the industry-wide losses, but Intermarche CEO Thierry Cotillard told BFM TV that the “unprecedented” attack would result in losses of “tens of millions of euros across the country in one day.”.

Christelle Delberg, CEO of the European Retail Association Eurocommerce, said: This incident highlights the importance of ensuring the sustainability of the entire supply chain.

Supermarket refrigeration departments are typically managed using control panels that control the entire store’s fridges and freezers, and which can be accessed online, allowing service companies to customize them from anywhere in the world.

A source close to Lecornu said ANSSI had discovered a vulnerability in software supplied by Danish company Danfoss. Danfoss said it was “aware of incidents in France affecting a limited number of refrigeration management systems.”.

Danfoss said the affected devices “used outdated firmware,” adding that the company “has long recommended that customers update supported systems with the latest firmware and migrate legacy systems to current-generation solutions.”.

As CNN notes, on August 9, Claroty cybersecurity company Team82 published a study that detailed vulnerabilities in the Danfoss AK-SM 800A controller. According to the report, software updates released by Danfoss fixed issues that could have allowed attackers to bypass authentication tools and execute code on compromised devices.