France blames Iran's Revolutionary Guards for supermarket fridge cyberattack

France has accused Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of carrying out a cyberattack that disabled refrigeration systems in about 700 French supermarkets in October, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on Monday. Barrot said Iran's ambassador in Paris had been summoned to protest over what he called an attack of "unprecedented scale and aggressiveness."

The attack, overnight on 11 to 12 October, raised temperatures in supermarket fridges and freezers to as much as 50°C, according to Observador, spoiling food and causing fires at some stores including those of the Intermarché chain. Barrot called it the first large-scale cyberattack for sabotage purposes carried out on French soil.

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau announced a judicial investigation targeting the head of Shahid Kaveh, a cyberattack unit linked to the Revolutionary Guard's electronics and cyber centre, and his two deputies, with international arrest warrants sought against them. Investigators said the attack bore the unit's characteristic signature: the use of the Farsi language and IP addresses pointing to devices inside Iran.

The hackers took remote control of refrigeration control software made by Danfoss and Dixell, prosecutors said, triggering abnormal, unlimited defrost cycles while disabling the temperature-alert systems that would normally have warned staff.

Barrot said France would push for European Union sanctions against those responsible and would take further public and non-public measures in response. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the issue would be discussed at the bloc's Foreign Affairs Council on 16 November, and that the EU's response should be "stronger" if the attacks are confirmed as Iran's work.

Similar attacks on supermarket and food-company refrigeration systems have hit other European countries since mid-October, including Germany, where stores in the Ennepe-Ruhr district, Wuppertal and the Münsterland region were affected, as well as Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden and, in recent days, Switzerland. A French blood bank was targeted in a similar attack in early November. Barrot did not say whether Iran was behind the attacks outside France, and investigators have so far found no concrete evidence pointing to other perpetrators.

German security services have not yet attributed the attacks on stores in Germany, with officials saying the cases are being handled by the country's Joint Hybrid Threats Defence Centre. The European Commission said it was in direct contact with national authorities and member states' cyber-crisis network, which it said was helping coordinate information-sharing given that several countries have been affected.