By Liam FosterA mysterious wave of cyberattacks left supermarket fridges hacked across at least six European countries beginning Monday, November 2, 2026, forcing grocery chains and independent shops to discard tons of spoiled food worth millions of euros. Attackers remotely hijacked internet-connected temperature controllers and cranked commercial cooling units up to extreme heat levels overnight.
Spoiled Food from Sweden to Greece
Retailers in Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, Italy, and Estonia reported sudden refrigeration failures on Monday after remote intruders altered digital thermostat settings. At an ICA Kvantum grocery store in Sjöbo, Sweden, workers had to empty freezers into shopping carts for disposal after hackers set the store’s cooling units to 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit).
Smaller food businesses were also targeted during the cross-border campaign, which followed a similar wave of attacks weeks earlier across hundreds of stores in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In the Kifisia suburb of Athens, Greece, butcher shop owner George Boubas reported that employees arriving at 4 a.m. found a meat chiller heated to 150 degrees Celsius (302 degrees Fahrenheit).
It took a refrigeration technician two hours to regain control of the Athens unit and prevent the meat inventory from spoiling, after which Boubas disconnected the chillers from Wi-Fi entirely. The technician noted that a nearby supermarket and a local fast-food restaurant had suffered the exact same remote temperature tampering.
Outdated Controllers and Default Passwords to Blame
Cybersecurity investigators in France and Britain traced the intrusions not to sophisticated artificial intelligence, but to neglected internet-facing hardware and weak security practices. France’s national cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, which first issued an alert on October 12, identified compromised remote controllers in the AK-SM and AK-SC product lines made by Danish manufacturer Danfoss, as well as systems from U.S.-based Copeland and Dixell xweb.
Danfoss stated that most affected units were older, discontinued models that no longer receive software patches, while Copeland confirmed a vulnerability in retired controllers. Katerina Mitrokotsa, a cybersecurity professor at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, noted that stores connect chillers online to monitor temperatures, save energy, and fix faults remotely, but fail to secure them like computers.
Nicole Carignan, senior vice president of security and AI strategy at Darktrace, observed that companies pour budgets into trendy Technology initiatives while neglecting the operational hardware keeping food cold. She emphasized that intruders did not need zero-day exploits or AI tools, instead walking through internet-exposed controllers running end-of-life firmware and default passwords.
European Regulators Coordinate Response
British officials echoed that assessment on Tuesday, November 3, with U.K. Cyber Minister Liz Lloyd stating that the French grocery hacks stemmed from known vulnerabilities and poor cyber hygiene. Richard Horne, head of the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre, confirmed that the compromised French chillers were connected directly to the internet using default factory passwords, prompting his team to work through Monday night warning exposed operators.
NCSC Director of Operations Paul Chichester reiterated that there was no evidence artificial intelligence played any role in the refrigeration sabotage. Meanwhile, Italian intelligence and cybersecurity officials convened on Tuesday morning alongside European Commission counterparts to coordinate defenses across the 27-nation bloc, with Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier warning that the incidents are not isolated.
