Hackers Break Into Supermarket Fridges and Spoil All the Groceries
“Unprecedented.”
Published Oct 13, 2026 12:33 PM EDT
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Over Sunday night, some spoilsport hackers hijacked the fridge systems of hundreds of supermarkets across France and cranked up their thermostats to temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit, ruining incalculable stores of groceries and even causing fires.
As Reuters reports, the Paris prosecutor’s office described it as a “large-scale” attack that affected “several major food retailers across France.”
The numbers are incredible. The chain Carrefour said that 80 of its supermarkets were attacked. The owner of Intermarche said that fridges at 150 stores were heated up to 122 degrees for six hours overnight. And Monoprix, which has 490 stores in France, said that about five percent of its locations were affected.
Intermarche CEO Thierry Cotillard, in comments to BFM TV quoted by Reuters, estimated that the attack has caused losses amounting to “tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day,” calling it “unprecedented.”
Cooperative U CEO Dominique Schelcher, who says 80 of his supermarket locations were also affected, echoed those comments.
“Targeting equipment essential to the preservation of fresh products and to the food supply of the French people is of extreme gravity and is unprecedented,” he wrote in a statement on X.
Supermarket fridges and freezers are designed to be accessible over the internet so organizations can monitor their temperatures and remotely adjust them as needed. But evidently these setups weren’t as secure as they should have been. France’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) is reportedly investigating the attack and has identified a vulnerability in the software supplied by the Danish firm Danfoss.
Danfoss told Reuters it was “aware of incidents in France affecting a limited number of refrigeration management systems,” and said that the affected units “were running outdated firmware.” Recent software updates patched a series of vulnerabilities found by the cybersecurity firm Team82 in August which could allow attackers to bypass authentication controls and remotely execute code, the reporting noted.
The attack may not be limited to France. The Dutch retailer Ahold Delhaize, which also owns supermarket chains like Food Lion and Giant in the US, said it was dealing with a “security issue” on its end and took some of its systems offline as a precaution. It insisted, though, that there was no reason to draw a link with the French incidents.
Given the recent noise around AI’s role in hacking sprees, it’s difficult not wonder if this was yet another example. A CrowdStrike report published February found that there was a nearly 90 percent year over year increase in AI-enabled cyberattacks.
More on cybersecurity: Rogue AI Agents Have Gone Too Far Now That They’ve Infiltrated Wikipedia
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Frank Landymore
Contributing Writer
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
