News
Hackers Cooked France’s Food Supply. Britain Should Take Note
— 3 mins read
An overnight cyber attack forced fridges in hundreds of French supermarkets to 50C. It deserves more attention than it is getting.
On Sunday night, while France slept, someone turned up the heat.
Hackers took control of the systems that regulate refrigeration in hundreds of French supermarkets and ordered the fridges and freezers to warm up and stay warm. Intermarché says its units ran at 50C for six hours overnight into Monday. When managers opened up on Monday morning, hot air was coming off the freezer aisles. In some stores there were small fires.
The figures are still coming in, and they are large. Coopérative U says more than 100 of its supermarkets were targeted. Intermarché and its Netto brand had 180 stores affected, and another 100 were cut off from the internet as a precaution. Carrefour says 80 of its stores were hit and Monoprix about 5% of its shops; E.Leclerc was also affected. Altogether, about 400 of France’s roughly 15,000 supermarkets were hit. Two shops in Alsace reported losses of €270,000 between them. Intermarché’s chief executive, Thierry Cotillard, told BFMTV the cost would reach “tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day”.
The attack did not stop at France either. Analysts at the security firm Sekoia say stores in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany and Belgium were also affected.
How it happened
The attackers went after software from Danfoss, a Danish engineering firm whose controllers let retailers and their maintenance contractors manage cold units remotely. A source close to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu says ANSSI, France’s national cyber security agency, has found a vulnerability in that software. Danfoss says the affected units were older models on outdated firmware. It adds that it had “long advised” customers to keep their systems up to date and to replace legacy equipment.
That is true as far as it goes. In August, researchers at Claroty published details of flaws in a Danfoss store controller that could let an attacker bypass authentication and run code on the device. Fixes were available. It is not yet known whether the attackers used those flaws, and nobody has claimed responsibility. Paris prosecutors have opened a cyber-crime investigation.
Why it matters
Most of the coverage has treated this as a curiosity, with hacked fridges and melted ice cream on a Paris pavement. It deserves more weight than that.
This was not a data breach or a ransom demand. No one’s card details were stolen. The attack reached into physical equipment and destroyed food on a large scale, overnight, in several countries at once. The EU’s food commissioner, Christophe Hansen, put it plainly: “the weaponisation of food has become a reality.”
The EU’s food commissioner, Christophe Hansen, put it plainly: “the weaponisation of food has become a reality.”
The weakness it exposed is not unusual. Supermarket refrigeration is built to run for many years. The controllers attached to it are often set up with remote access so that maintenance firms can reach them easily, and then they are left alone. Many are past the point where the manufacturer still issues security updates. That is not a French problem; it is how commercial refrigeration works almost everywhere.
What it means for Britain
No British retailer has reported being affected. But British shoppers have already seen how quickly a cyber attack shows up on the shelves. In 2025, attacks on Marks & Spencer and the Co-op left shelves short of stock and stopped online orders for weeks.
Food is one of the UK’s 13 critical national infrastructure sectors. Food safety rules are strict, and chilled food must be kept at 8C or below. Keeping the controllers that hold it at that temperature secure is left largely to retailers and their contractors.
The questions for British supermarkets are simple. Which controllers are running in their stores, how old are they, and who can reach them from the internet? After this weekend, every chain should know the answers.
