France Blames Iranian Military Hackers for Cyber-Attack on Supermarket Freezers
Paris has attributed an attack that overheated shop refrigerators to hackers linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the first official implication of the Iranian state in this kind of operation.
By Khalid Khalil ·
France has formally blamed hackers operating under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a central branch of Iran's military establishment, for a cyber-attack that targeted freezers in French supermarkets. The announcement marks the first time a state has been officially implicated in this type of hack.
The disruption was severe and made headlines around the world. Some refrigerators had their temperatures raised so high that they caught fire, and in the hours after the hack, supermarket employees dumped piles of perished meat and melted ice cream into rubbish containers. France's foreign minister condemned the incident as an act of "unprecedented scale and unprecedented aggression" and promised that "Europe-wide sanctions" would be imposed against those responsible.
Unlike earlier operations attributed to Iranian hackers, this one carried no overt message. In 2023, a state-backed group interrupted television streaming services in the United Arab Emirates to broadcast a deepfake report on the war in Gaza. In the same year, hackers affiliated with Iran displayed the slogan "down with Israel" on the screens of water-control equipment made by an Israeli firm.
The French incident follows attacks on industrial freezers at an Israeli food production plant in May and a wave of freezer malfunctions that spoiled food at US military bases in August, which are now reportedly being treated as a suspected hack. Neither of those episodes has been officially attributed to Iran.
Rafe Pilling, a senior director at the cybersecurity firm Sophos, said the relatively unsophisticated nature of the attack, in which hackers used default passwords to gain access to fridge controls, was consistent with Iranian capabilities. "The attacks themselves were not particularly complex," he said. Pilling added that there was now a presumption the French attacks and a wave of rogue defrosting hacks across Europe last week were linked.
Hostile cyber operations against the west are generally traced to four states with distinct aims and methods: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. China has concentrated on industrial espionage and mass data gathering, Russia on disrupting enemy infrastructure and spreading disinformation, and North Korea on hacking cryptocurrency exchanges because it needs money. Iran, according to Pilling, wants to put a shot across the bow of its enemies. "In general Iran uses cyber-attacks to project power internationally and to signal their political displeasure with regional and international adversaries," he said.
The freezer hacks came as the UK's national cybersecurity centre warned that the country is in the "foothills" of a new level of cyber threat and should expect a "huge rise" in the volume of incidents. The main concern is artificial intelligence, a technology now capable of highlighting previously unforeseen flaws in IT systems and of helping attackers plan and carry out attacks.
Even so, the underlying context of the fridge attacks is not AI but geopolitics, since the vulnerabilities in the refrigeration systems were relatively easy to find and exploit. The combination of groundbreaking technology and tense global relations nonetheless makes for an alarming landscape.
