France has attributed a cyberattack on supermarket fridges to hackers operating under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a key branch of Iran’s military establishment.
The attack disrupted supermarkets across France and made headlines around the world. Some refrigerators had their temperature turned up so high that they caught fire. In the hours after the hack, supermarket employees dumped perished meat and melted ice cream into trash containers.
France’s foreign minister described the attack as an act of “unprecedented scale and unprecedented aggression.” He promised that “Europe-wide sanctions” would be imposed on those responsible.
Earlier attacks on freezers have also been reported. Industrial freezers at an Israeli food production plant were hit in May. A wave of freezer malfunctions spoiled food at US military bases in August, and it is now reportedly being treated as a suspected hack. Neither case has been officially attributed to Iran. The French announcement is the first to implicate a state in this type of hack.
Rafe Pilling, a senior director at the cybersecurity firm Sophos, said the attacks were not particularly complex. He said the hackers used default passwords to access the fridge controls, which is in line with Iranian capabilities.
Pilling said there was now a presumption that the French attacks were linked to a wave of rogue defrosting hacks across Europe last week.
He said Iran generally uses cyberattacks to project power internationally and to signal political displeasure to regional and international adversaries.
Iranian state-backed groups have carried out disruptive operations before. In 2023, one group interrupted TV streaming services in the United Arab Emirates to broadcast a deepfake report on the war in Gaza. In the same year, hackers affiliated with Iran displayed the slogan “down with Israel” on the screens of water-control equipment made by an Israeli firm.
The fridge attacks came as the UK’s national cybersecurity centre warned that the country is in the “foothills” of a new level of cyber threat and should expect a “huge rise” in the volume of incidents. The main concern is artificial intelligence, a technology now capable of highlighting previously unforeseen flaws in IT systems and helping attackers plan and carry out attacks.
Source: The Guardian
