Europe on alert after supermarket freezers hit by cyber-attacks in 10 countries

A wave of cyber-attacks struck supermarket chains across at least 10 European countries on Monday, prompting European Union officials to warn of a deliberate attempt to disrupt the food supply chain. Supermarkets in Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany and Sweden reported problems, with refrigerator and freezer temperatures in some stores soaring as high as 50C (122F). The rise in temperatures forced retailers to discard spoiled food, with losses estimated in the tens of millions of euros. No-one has yet admitted carrying out the attacks. The incidents come three weeks after a cyber-attack disrupted as many as 700 French grocery stores, causing food losses also estimated at tens of millions of euros. The security of refrigeration systems and other remotely monitored devices has heightened concerns about government-backed hybrid attacks. The EU's food and agriculture commissioner, Christophe Hansen, said the bloc was taking the incidents very seriously and warned of further disruption in the future. Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier stopped short of attributing blame but said the incidents showed "how cyber-attacks can disrupt essential services and affect citizens' daily lives". "These are not isolated incidents and of course we have to be collectively resilient and prepared for such cyber incidents," he added. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni's government called a meeting with intelligence chiefs, though it said the impact was "currently very limited" and that most of the food distribution chain had up-to-date security systems. At least four Co-op supermarkets in Sicily and one business in Tuscany were affected, according to the national cybersecurity agency, which said the hit businesses were "mostly still equipped with obsolete security systems, with interfaces directly exposed to the internet and inadequate authentication mechanisms". Belgian supermarkets were among the hardest hit, with dozens of stores reporting refrigeration failures and federal prosecutors opening an investigation. Mathieu Tilman, a manager at a Delhaize supermarket in Belgium, described the attack as distressing: "I don't even understand how anyone could do this... How can we end up throwing away so much food?" Elsewhere, 13 SuperValu stores in Ireland were affected by what owner Musgrave Group called a cyber-incident, with replenishment of chilled and frozen ranges under way. A small number of corner shops in the Netherlands suffered disruption, a month after Albert Heijn took several services offline in a separate attack. In Germany, the Rewe Büsken supermarket in the west was hit after a cyber-attack on system provider Danfoss, with systems back in operation by Monday afternoon. Portugal's Mosqueteiros group linked incidents at seven Intermarché stores to an attack that appeared to target an external refrigeration service provider. Swedish chain ICA reported refrigeration problems at a limited number of stores, Finland's Kesko group detected irregular temperatures in a few smaller stores, and in Estonia at least one supermarket had its refrigeration units raised to 50C, according to public broadcaster ERR. In the UK, the National Cyber Security Centre has warned British retailers to update the software on fridge temperature controls, and said the country was likely to suffer an AI-powered cyber-attack on critical national infrastructure within two years. NCSC head Richard Horne told BBC Radio 4's Today programme there had been a couple of instances in the UK where "vulnerable technology has been exploited". "It's not just supermarkets, it's through the whole food supply chain, and we've been working through the night alerting organisations where we can see they've got exposed technology that's vulnerable in this way," he said.