Iran Turned France's Supermarket Fridges to 50°C — Now Paris Has Named the Culprits

On Monday, France did something governments rarely do in public: it named the country it says attacked its supermarkets. Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot told reporters that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind the October cyberattack that remotely seized control of refrigeration systems in hundreds of French supermarkets and pushed temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius, spoiling food worth tens of millions of euros. Paris has summoned Iran's ambassador, opened a formal criminal investigation and says it will seek sanctions at a European level.

The attack itself happened on the nights of 11 and 12 October. According to CNN, hackers connected remotely to supermarket refrigerators and freezers and switched on defrost cycles, sending temperatures soaring overnight. Around 700 supermarkets were hit, among them stores run by E-Leclerc, Intermarché, Carrefour, Monoprix and Système U. The attackers took over online control systems supplied by the Danish firm Danfoss and Italy's Dixell — and, as Reuters reported, many of the affected units were obsolete or running outdated firmware, which experts say made them easy to break into.

What France says it found

France's national cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, attributes the attack to a unit called Shahid Kaveh, described as an offensive cyber unit affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard's electronic and cyber centre. The evidence Paris cites is the use of Farsi in the attack infrastructure and IP addresses pointing to devices located in Iran. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said on Monday that a formal judicial investigation had been opened into suspected organised cybercrime committed to serve the interests of a foreign power — in this case, Iran — and that international arrest warrants had been requested against the head of Shahid Kaveh and his two deputies.

Barrot called the attack "unprecedented in its scale and level of aggressiveness" and the first large-scale cyberattack carried out for sabotage purposes on French soil. It is important to be precise about what that means: this is France's attribution, based on evidence it has described but not published in full. Iran has not commented on the latest accusations and routinely denies carrying out malicious cyber operations. The Times, citing The New York Times, reported that American intelligence agencies had reached only a "low-confidence" judgment that Iran was responsible. The accusation is official and serious — it is not yet independently proven.

A second wave, and an American echo

France was not the only target. On 2 November, supermarkets in at least nine other European countries reported suspected attacks on their freezer systems, including dozens of stores in Belgium and Luxembourg. Our earlier report on that second wave of supermarket freezer hacks described the same method: temperatures in the cooling systems rising without warning. Paris has not officially tied the November wave to Iran, and it remains unclear whether the incidents are linked.

There is also an American thread. On 5 November, the US cybersecurity agency CISA and the FBI published a fact sheet on the same kind of activity, and Reuters reported that Pentagon investigators are treating malfunctions in US military commissary refrigerators in August as a suspected cyberattack, with Iran considered a suspect while the investigation continues. France's foreign ministry links the fridge attacks to a longer campaign of destabilisation it attributes to Iran, citing the hacking of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2023 and attempts to disrupt the Paris Olympic Games in 2024 — all against the backdrop of the war with Iran that began in February.

What happens next

The immediate consequences are diplomatic and legal: a summoned ambassador, a criminal investigation with named suspects, and a push for European sanctions against those France holds responsible. The deeper question is whether the attribution holds up under scrutiny, and whether other governments — including Washington — endorse it. What is already clear is the lesson for everyone else: the systems that keep food cold in a supermarket turned out to be connected, poorly defended and worth attacking. The next target may not be a fridge at all — but the warning, delivered in Paris on Monday, is that this kind of sabotage now counts as an act against a nation, and will be answered as one.

Sources: CNN; Al Jazeera. The attribution is France's official claim; Iran denies carrying out cyber operations and has not commented on these specific accusations.