Second Wave Of Cyberattacks Paralyze Supermarket Fridges Across EU, Weeks After Gov’ts Urged Food Stockpiling

Cyberattacks disrupted supermarket refrigeration systems across Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland and Estonia on Monday morning, forcing retailers to discard spoiled food and exposing the last mile of the food supply chain to major disruptions. The cyberattacks came just weeks after governments urged households to maintain emergency food supplies.

Reuters reports that supermarket chains Ahold Delhaize and Colruyt reported cyberattacks affecting critical refrigeration systems in Belgium and Luxembourg. Carrefour said 15 Belgian stores were impacted, while Irish wholesaler Musgrave said refrigeration systems at 13 SuperValu locations were affected.

“There has been a cyberattack and all our freezers reached 50 degrees (Celsius),” Engla Ingwall, sales manager at an ICA franchise store in Stockholm, told the outlet. Ingwall said the attack occurred around 0200 local time.

Stephan Moelans, chief executive of Belgian refrigeration company Sabcobel, which operates Delhaize’s systems, told the news outlet Belga that attackers switched refrigeration evaporators into defrost mode.

The cyber incidents follow an attack in France last month, when hackers seized control of cooling units at hundreds of supermarkets, causing high food losses. The similarities suggest that the earlier attack was a pilot run for broader chaos.

Let’s not forget the cyber incidents came weeks after governments in Europe, the US, and Australia urged folks to stockpile food. Those advisories did not identify a specific imminent threat.

Targeting refrigeration systems at supermarkets can quickly destroy perishable foods and disrupt food availability. The pattern here is that saboteurs have an objective of causing mass chaos, but not through kinetic means; rather, by attacking the food supply chain. This builds on weeks of a communist revolution in France that has spread to surrounding countries.