Tuesday 3 November 2026
Hackers cook the freezers in supermarkets across seven European countries, and food by the ton goes in the bin
Supermarkets in at least seven European countries found their fridges and freezers hacked on Monday, with temperatures pushed as high as 50 to 55 degrees Celsius and large quantities of food spoiled and thrown out. The Times reported about 60 branches hit in Belgium, 13 SuperValu stores in Ireland, more than a dozen in Sweden and others in the Netherlands, Finland, Estonia and Luxembourg, three weeks after a similar attack hit as many as 700 stores in France. Ahold Delhaize said about 40 of its stores in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected, and Carrefour reported 15 stores in Belgium. Technicians said the attackers switched the units into defrost mode through outdated software in Danfoss temperature controllers. Britain's National Cyber Security Centre warned British retailers to update the software on their fridge controllers with urgency, and a handful of British meat suppliers had to throw out produce after their fridges were raised to 38 degrees. No group has claimed responsibility, and the origin of the attack has not been established.
The attack worked because the equipment was reachable. The refrigeration units run on networked controllers, many of them older Danfoss systems, and security researchers say several thousand of those management systems sit open on the internet with weak login protection. The hackers set the evaporators to defrost, which is a normal function used to clear ice, and left them there. A freezer that normally holds food at minus 22 degrees warmed through the night. One Delhaize branch in Flanders put its losses at about 100,000 euros in products. In Sweden, an ICA store manager told Reuters that employees did not notice the attack, which hit at 2 a.m., until hours later. The European Union said on Monday that it was taking the cyberattacks very seriously, and the food and agriculture commissioner, Christophe Hansen, called the repeated attacks a deliberate attempt to disrupt the food supply chain and undermine consumer confidence.
The French attack last month is the template investigators are working from. Hackers took control of cooling units in as many as 700 French supermarkets and spoiled goods worth tens of millions of pounds. Technology executives in Estonia and Belgium said Monday's attack carried the same signature. Belgian refrigeration firm Sabcobel, which runs the systems Delhaize uses, said about 20 of its units were affected and that technicians were disconnecting units from the network. The fix for any store still running the old software is unglamorous: update the controllers, close the internet exposure, and check the freezers before the food reaches a customer.
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