French supermarkets targeted in massive cyberattack heating refrigerators to dangerous levels

Overnight, without warning or visible breach, the refrigerators and freezers in hundreds of French supermarkets began to malfunction in unison. The temperatures climbed steadily upward—past safe levels, past the point of salvage—reaching as high as 50 degrees Celsius. What should have been a cold chain holding perishable food at safe temperatures became an oven. By morning, the damage was visible: spoiled inventory, fires breaking out inside the units, and a coordinated attack that had struck across multiple major food retailers simultaneously.

The Paris prosecutor's office confirmed on Monday what store managers and security teams had begun to suspect: this was not a series of mechanical failures or isolated incidents. A large-scale cyberattack had targeted the connected refrigeration systems themselves—the networked devices that control temperature and monitoring across modern supermarket chains. Hackers had found their way into systems designed to be remotely managed and had weaponized that connectivity, raising temperatures across the network with apparent precision and coordination.

The scope became clear as reports accumulated. Hundreds of stores across France had been affected. The attack had struck at major food retailers, the kind of chains that anchor grocery shopping for millions of people. The immediate consequences were tangible: massive food losses as perishables spoiled in the artificial heat, fires that posed risks to both property and the people working in and shopping at these locations, and the sudden unavailability of refrigerated goods that customers expected to find.

The French government moved quickly to treat the incident as a matter of national concern. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu instructed France's National Cybersecurity Agency, known as ANSSI, to launch a formal investigation. The decision to involve the country's top cybersecurity authority signaled that this was not being treated as ordinary commercial crime but as an attack on critical infrastructure—the systems that keep food safe and available to the public.

The attack exposed a vulnerability that had been largely theoretical until it became practical: the risk inherent in connecting everyday retail infrastructure to networks. Refrigeration systems, once purely mechanical, have increasingly become part of the internet of things—devices that communicate with central management systems, allow remote monitoring, and can be updated or adjusted from afar. That connectivity brings efficiency and convenience. It also creates a surface for attack. Someone, somewhere, had found a way through that surface and had chosen to use it not for theft or espionage but for disruption—heating machines designed to preserve food, causing immediate, visible damage across an entire country's retail network in a single coordinated strike.