Cyberattack on supermarkets: fridges heated to 50 degrees Celsius

A cyberattack has knocked out refrigeration in supermarkets in Sweden, Ireland and Estonia: hackers set the temperature to 50 degrees, and the shops threw out all their chilled goods. This is reported by an international news agency and Swedish media.

All the stock had to be thrown away

“Overnight, our refrigeration and freezer equipment was hacked, and the temperature inside rose to 50 degrees,” said Engla Ingwall, sales manager at the Ica Baronen supermarket in Stockholm. How does the store know it was an attack? “That is what we were told,” she replied. A sign at the entrance now says that all refrigeration equipment is out of service because of a cyberattack. Nothing looked wrong from the outside: “The only thing you notice is that it’s warm inside the freezer.” Everything had to go: “all” of the chilled goods.

It was not just this one store. Temperatures also shot up in the fridges of other Swedish shops in the Ica and Coop chains. The incidents are being investigated by Sweden’s cybersecurity centre, its head John Billow said. The Ica store in the town of Sjöbo said: “What must not happen has happened!”

The attack swept across Europe

In Ireland, SuperValu, the country’s third-largest supermarket chain, reported a similar situation: 13 stores are affected. According to a Swedish newspaper, some shops in Estonia were hit too.

The mechanism was the same as in the large-scale attack on hundreds of stores in France in early October, when refrigeration stopped working and many fresh and frozen foods spoiled. According to one supermarket owner, the total cost could reach tens of millions of euros, at least hundreds of millions of crowns. Supermarket refrigeration is usually run from central panels that can be controlled remotely over the internet.

Last month the Ahold Delhaize group turned to the Dutch police over a cyberattack on its systems and shut down its shopping apps. In the Netherlands, Albert Heijn has since restored them, as has Delhaize in Belgium. In Czechia, the Albert app is still not working.

Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz