France has accused Iran of being behind a massive cyberattack on supermarket refrigerators and cold-storage cabinets, an act that its Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, described as “unprecedented in scale and aggression”. Barrot said sanctions would be imposed “across Europe” against those responsible, adding that the attacks, which seized control of digital thermostats to raise temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius, constituted “a grave violation of the nation’s interests”. The Iranian ambassador was summoned to protest “in the strongest possible terms against this extremely serious act”.
At a press conference during the G7 summit in Paris, Barrot confirmed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was responsible for the attack. Paris public prosecutor Laure Beccuau announced that investigators had identified a “modus operandi” characteristic of the Iranian group Shahid Kaveh, a cyberwarfare unit linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). This included “the use of Farsi and IP addresses traced to devices located in Iran”. Her office has opened an investigation against the head of Shahid Kaveh and his deputies on charges of “deceptive attacks on an automated data processing system and causing dangerous harm to persons”, aggravated by acting on behalf of a foreign power, Iran.
The cyberattacks hit a large number of French supermarkets on 11 and 12 October, forcing some of them to throw out their entire stock of perishable food. The hackers remotely raised the temperatures of thousands of refrigerators and cold-storage cabinets in around 700 supermarkets and shops across France, from -27°C to over 50°C in some cases. Thousands of tonnes of food were thrown away, and in some stores the extreme temperature rise caused fires, triggering sprinklers and water damage. Similar incidents have since been reported, including supermarket refrigerators in other European countries last week and a French blood bank, where technicians managed to disconnect equipment before the products were destroyed.
Gérôme Billois, a partner at the cybersecurity firm Wavestone, stressed that Shahid Kaveh has been active since 2020 and is known for carrying out cyberattacks mainly against water distribution systems in the United States. He warned that, since the group has the tools, determination and time, we must be prepared to see attacks on other systems such as water or electricity. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, said that cyber incidents in Europe, if attributed to Iran, require a strong response. This year, the EU designated the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, an important decision made possible after France dropped its long-standing objection.
Taken from The Guardian