France accuses Iran's Revolutionary Guard of supermarket fridge cyberattacks
Seven Lights
France accused the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on Monday of carrying out cyberattacks that raised the temperatures of supermarket refrigerators and freezers across the country last month, forcing the destruction of tons of chilled and frozen food.
“I can confirm that this attack was carried out by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on the sidelines of a G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Paris. He called the assault “unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression” and said those responsible would be hit with sanctions. France summoned the Iranian ambassador in Paris to lodge a protest and warned of “proportionate” measures, “whether public or otherwise,” to deter a repeat.
The Paris prosecutor said attackers seized control of refrigeration equipment remotely through web interfaces “to initiate abnormal, indefinite defrost cycles.” Security alerts from sensors designed to sound when temperatures crossed a threshold were “simultaneously disabled,” she added. Prosecutors named Hamid Reza Lashgarian as a commander in the Guard’s Quds Force, which handles foreign operations, and said a hallmark of the unit’s methods was the use of Persian-language tooling and internet addresses traceable to terminals inside Iran.
Iran had not responded officially, though some Iranian media dismissed the allegations as baseless. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said after Mr. Barrot that “our response should be strong.”
The French accusations follow a wave of attacks on European supermarket refrigeration reported in October, which investigators at the time attributed to hackers exploiting internet-connected temperature controllers. French officials have treated the episode as the most serious cyber operation on European food infrastructure to date.
The case now moves to the question of response. Paris has signaled sanctions are prepared, and officials say any further measures may be overt or covert. Iran’s formal reply had not been received as of Monday evening.