Fridges Turned Up to 50°C: Refrigeration Controls Targeted in Fresh Attacks on European Supermarkets

Overnight into Monday, November 2, attackers remotely altered the settings on refrigeration controls at supermarkets in Belgium, Sweden, Estonia and other European countries, warming fridges and freezers. No chain reported more than several dozen affected stores, but some had to throw away chilled and frozen food or take it off sale. Danfoss, a Danish maker of refrigeration controls, said its products were involved, as they were three weeks earlier when hundreds of French supermarkets were hit. No one had claimed the attacks by Monday night, and it was not known whether they were linked to the French incident.

Refrigeration controls are computers that run a store's fridges and freezers. They can be connected to the internet so contractors can monitor them and fix faults remotely. In Belgium, attackers switched cooling units into defrost mode, which made them heat up instead of keeping food cold. In other cases, temperature settings were raised: a Swedish ICA store reported units set to 50°C, and a butcher near Antwerp saw fridges turned up to 18°C, with an estimated €15,000 of meat ruined. In Estonia, a freezer was set to 50°C but rose only 2-3°C and was fixed within about 10 minutes.

When The Hacker News checked on November 3, Danfoss's security advisories page listed nothing about the attacks. The most detailed steps for operators remain those in an October alert from CERT-FR, part of France's national cybersecurity agency. Each company described the incident in its own words, and not all called it a cyberattack.