Hackers broke into supermarket refrigeration systems across France and told the fridges to warm up.
On Sunday night, attackers accessed refrigeration controls at hundreds of French supermarkets and set the cooling systems to defrost instead of chill, according to Bloomberg. About 150 of the affected stores belonged to Intermarche, a spokesman for parent company Groupement Mousquetaires confirmed to Bloomberg. Fridges and freezers climbed to roughly 50 degrees Celsius for about six hours. Stores ended up tossing out meat, frozen goods, and vegetables that could not be saved.
Grocery chains rarely treat refrigeration controllers as attack surface, but they are networked industrial systems like any other, and this incident shows what happens when someone flips the wrong switch at scale. The damage here was spoiled inventory rather than stolen data, a reminder that attacks on physical infrastructure can be cheap to pull off and expensive to clean up in very mundane ways.
No one has claimed responsibility, and Bloomberg has not said how the attackers got in, which is usually the detail companies would rather you skip.