On 9 November, the French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barro, stated that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) may be behind the cyberattack on fridges in hundreds of French supermarkets. He said that those responsible would be found and would be held to account “at European level”.
The French Foreign Ministry summoned the Iranian ambassador in Paris. Tehran has not yet commented on the allegations. The French Public Prosecutor’s Office announced an investigation and named the hacker group ‘Shahid Kaveh’, linked to the IRGC, among the suspects.
The attack took place on the night of 12 October. The hackers remotely altered the settings of refrigerators and freezers, causing the temperature inside them to rise to 50 degrees for several hours. Shops were forced to throw away the spoiled food; the damage could amount to several million euros.
On the night of 2 November, supermarket refrigerators in a further seven European countries were subjected to similar attacks. In France, hackers also breached systems at three donor plasma storage facilities and altered the settings from −30 to +110 degrees. Damage to blood products was successfully averted.
The original version of this article first appeared on Glob-News.com.