France blames Iran’s Revolutionary Guards for fridge cyber-attacks
France has formally attributed October’s cyber-attacks on supermarket refrigeration to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, summoning Tehran’s ambassador and seeking European sanctions. “It marks the first large-scale cyberattack aimed at sabotage on our national territory,” said Jean-Noël Barrot, the foreign minister. Paris prosecutors named the IRGC-linked unit Shahid Kaveh, sought international arrest warrants for its leader and two deputies, and said about 700 shops were hit and roughly twenty fires started.
The attacks on 11 and 12 October reset fridges into endless defrost cycles while disabling alarms, pushing temperatures to 50C overnight in more than 100 Coopérative U stores, at least 180 Intermarché and Netto shops, 80 Carrefours and about 5% of Monoprix’s outlets, spoiling food worth millions of euros; the software came from the Danish engineering firm Danfoss. A second wave hit more than 100 sites in Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland and reached refrigerators used by French blood banks, whose products were not damaged. Investigators cite Farsi-language traces and Iranian IP addresses. Mr Barrot called the campaign “unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression” and promised sanctions “against all those responsible”; Iran had not responded by evening. The attribution lands as the war itself grinds on: Iran’s Guards say they struck three tankers near Hormuz on Sunday for using “unauthorised routes”, Hormozgan officials confirmed the overnight US strikes on Qeshm hit nothing of value, and Tehran insists its seven demands — the blockade lifted, sanctions eased — stand. Watch the EU sanctions list.