A cyberattack damages the food of dozens of supermarkets in Belgium and Sweden

BrusselsDozens of supermarkets in Belgium and Sweden have been the target of a large-scale cyberattack tonight. According to Belgian media, the freezers suddenly heated up – some reached temperatures of 55 degrees – and all the food they contained was ruined. The losses, they claim, could reach 100,000 euros.

The incident took place two weeks after another similar attack on supermarkets in France, in which the temperatures of the cold storage rooms soared up to 80 degrees. At that time, hundreds of French supermarkets of the Intermarché and Coopérative U chains were affected, and the losses in the country were in the millions.

In Belgium, forty stores of the Delhaize chain, one of the most popular in the country, have been affected, as well as about fifteen Carrefour stores and at least five shops of the Spar brand. The refrigerators of the meat group De Laet en Van Haver have also suffered the consequences of the attack.

According to RTL Info, the managers of some Delhaize chain stores received a message around 4 a.m. informing them that the temperature of the freezers was increasing. Faced with the emergency, the staff traveled quickly to the points of sale to try to minimize the damage, and some brought refrigerated trucks to protect the merchandise.

"They changed the parameters, and this caused a change in the behavior of the refrigeration systems," relates Werner Muylle, head of the operations team at the meat group De Laet en Van Haver, to the Belga news agency. "The evaporators had been set to defrost mode, which caused the components inside the refrigerators to heat up in order to defrost them." In this case, they intervened in time and were able to pause the system before the refrigerators reached high temperatures.

In Sweden, the affected supermarkets are Ica and Coop. The country's national cybersecurity center has stated that it has received alerts about several incidents in the refrigeration system across the country and is working to resolve them. "We cannot regulate the temperature of the freezers or get them to cool down again. Only hot air comes out. Everything we had there has been ruined," says Rickard Nilsson, manager of the Ica store in Sjöbo, in southern Sweden, in statements to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.

For now, the origin of the cyberattack is unknown. On October 20th, the entry point for the hackers was the control software for the refrigeration systems of the Danish company Danfoss.