Hackers heat French supermarket fridges, causing fires and food losses (opens the source in a new tab)
- Hackers pushed connected fridges in French supermarkets up to 50°C overnight, causing fires and food losses at several hundred stores. The Paris prosecutor is investigating, and the prime minister has asked cyber agency ANSSI to look into it.
- About 150 Intermarché stores and 80 Carrefour supermarkets were hit, and Coopérative U was affected too; Intermarché’s owner threw all the food away. ANSSI traced the weak point to Danfoss refrigeration software, which Danfoss says was running outdated firmware.
- Separately, Ahold Delhaize took systems offline over a “security issue”, and websites of its US chains, including Stop & Shop and Giant, went down; any link is unclear.
- 50°C
- fridge temperature reached
- ~150
- Intermarché stores hit
- 80
- Carrefour stores hit
Why it matters The food supply now runs on connected equipment that few people think to patch, and one old firmware version turned shop fridges into a national-security problem overnight.
Watch next Whether investigators confirm the fridges ran firmware Danfoss had long urged customers to update; if so, this is a maintenance failure more than a new kind of attack.