Supermarkets in Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ireland lost refrigerated and frozen stock on Monday after hackers remotely altered temperature settings.
Zoom in: Freezers at an ICA store in Stockholm reached 50C (122F), and a Belgian butchery watched its cold room climb to 18C (64F). Carrefour reported 15 of its 700 Belgian stores hit and Coop reported 7 of 800 in Sweden.
- "Everything is destroyed," said Engla Ingwall, a sales manager at ICA Stockholm. "There has been a cyberattack and all our freezers reached 50 degrees."
- Musgrave said 13 SuperValu stores in Ireland were affected, and at least one IKEA store in Belgium reported a problem.
The backstory: The same playbook ran in France last month, when hackers seized cooling units at hundreds of supermarkets and caused fires and food losses. Ahold reported a cybersecurity incident to police last month as well.
- "It's very scary. They are hacking the system that is doing the registration of the temperature," said Luc De Laet, founder of the De Laet & Van Haver butchery.
Between the lines: Nobody claimed responsibility and nobody asked for money, which points security experts toward sabotage over extortion. The affected units trace back to Danish refrigeration firm Danfoss.
What they're saying: "All IT systems are potentially vulnerable, and AI can now be used to successfully exploit these weaknesses," said Katrien Eggers, a spokesperson for Belgium's Centre for Cybersecurity.
Why it matters: A thermostat is now an attack surface. Grocers across four countries binned stock without a single till system going down, which makes the damage physical, the loss immediate and the fix slow.
