(The Turkish Post) – A supermarket cyberattack remotely pushed refrigeration units in hundreds of French stores to about 50 degrees Celsius overnight, causing fires and large food losses, reports said on 12 October. The Paris prosecutor’s office described the attack as large-scale and said it targeted connected refrigerators at several major food retailers.
The attack affected several chains at once. Investigators have not identified who carried out it, and the government has asked the national cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, to investigate.
Connected refrigerators reached 50 degrees
Les Mousquetaires, the group that runs the Intermarché chain, reported that about 150 of its stores were hit. Its refrigerators were heated to 50 degrees for six hours, and the company discarded all the food stored in them.
Dominique Schelcher, the chief executive of Coopérative U, said his supermarkets had also been hit. Carrefour said 80 of its supermarkets were affected, and Monoprix said 5 percent of its stores were. E.Leclerc and Auchan did not respond to requests for comment.
Losses from the supermarket cyberattack
The chief executive of Intermarché estimated losses of “tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day.”The overnight heating also caused fires in some stores, reports said.
France supermarkets and an earlier breach
The overnight attack is separate from a data breach that Les Mousquetaires disclosed in early August. The company said data from about 300,000 customers of its online Drive service had been taken. It said 287,605 customers had been identified as affected, out of about 2 million Drive users.
The exposed fields were names, phone numbers, postal addresses, birth dates, loyalty card numbers and some online order details. The company said bank details, passwords and email addresses were not affected. It reported the incident to the French data protection authority, CNIL, and filed a complaint with the Paris prosecutor.
