Six Romanian stores of one retail chain hit by suspected fridge cyberattack, national cybersecurity agency says
Refrigeration equipment in six Romanian stores belonging to the same retail chain heated up sharply around 01:30 on Monday 2 November, in what the National Cyber Security Directorate (DNSC) is treating as a possible cyberattack on the controllers that run the fridges. The incident follows similar attacks on supermarkets in several European countries, which the European Commission has called "extremely worrying".
"On 2 November, around 01:30, the refrigeration equipment in six stores climbed to very high temperatures. The problem was only noticed at 08:00," DNSC director Dan Cîmpean told Libertatea. The incident was reported to the agency as a possible cyberattack on the controllers that manage the fridges. According to Cîmpean, the controllers were connected through GSM routers with fixed IP addresses, directly reachable from the internet, and were running fairly old software. The chain has not been named.
The Romanian case is part of a wider pattern. About 40 Delhaize supermarkets in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected overnight, according to the BBC, along with a smaller number of stores in Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland. Ahold Delhaize said an "IT incident" had raised temperatures in the cooling systems of dozens of its stores and that it was being investigated. Sweden's Coop said six of its stores were affected.
The European Commission condemned what it called "extremely worrying" repeated cyberattacks on supermarkets. In a statement, Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen noted that the incidents came three weeks after similar ones in France, which caused food losses worth millions of euros. The cause of the attacks has not been officially established.