Cyberattack shuts down refrigerators at French supermarkets

A cyberattack hit refrigeration systems at several major French supermarket chains overnight, remotely forcing cooling units to defrost and causing widespread spoilage of fresh food. According to French media, hackers compromised Danfoss refrigeration controllers running outdated software, exploiting their built-in automatic defrost function to raise temperatures across an estimated 250 to 350 stores belonging to Intermarché, Coopérative U, Carrefour Market, Monoprix, Leclerc, and Super U. Coopérative U's president publicly confirmed the incident and called the targeting of food-preservation infrastructure unprecedented and unacceptable, while the Paris prosecutor's office has opened a probe to identify victims and assess the resulting losses and reported fires. It remains unclear how the attackers gained access, though CISA flagged a high-severity authentication bypass flaw, CVE-2025-41450, in Danfoss's AK-SM 8xxA Series hardware back in May 2025; separately, retailer Ahold Delhaize also disclosed an unrelated cybersecurity incident affecting its own systems around the same time.