Retailers in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden reported problems with their refrigeration systems on Monday, and several companies confirmed they had been hacked.

The EU food and agriculture commissioner, Christophe Hansen, said the repeated cyber-attacks were deeply concerning, calling them “a deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain and undermine consumers’ confidence in it”.

The incidents follow an attack in France last month in which hackers seized control of cooling units in as many as 700 supermarkets, raising their temperatures as high ⁠as 50C (122F) and causing fires and food losses estimated in the tens of millions of euros.

A growing range of devices, including refrigeration systems, can now be monitored and controlled remotely, leading authorities to particularly fear government-sponsored hybrid attacks in after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Sweden’s Coop chain told the daily Aftonbladet that six of its shops ‌had been hit, while ICA said it was “aware that a limited number of stores were affected by an incident overnight which impacted their refrigeration and freezer systems”.

An ICA shop at Sjöbo in southern Sweden posted that its fridges and freezers had been hacked and their temperature set at 50C. Another in Stockholm said its freezers were broken “due to a 2am cyberattack” and that “everything was destroyed”.

The head of Sweden’s national cybersecurity centre, John Billow, said it ‌was working on incidents around the country. It had established the country had “quite a lot of exposed operational ‌technology devices” that needed updating or patching, he told Reuters.

The Dutch retailer Ahold Delhaize, which last month reported a similar incident to police in the Netherlands, said fridges and ⁠freezers in dozens of its ⁠supermarkets in Belgium ‌and ‌Luxembourg had been hit.

It did not specify the cause, but reporters visiting a shop north-east of Brussels saw refrigerators and freezers empty and a sign reading: “Due to cyberattacks, there will be no products on the refrigerated or freezer shelves. We offer our sincere apologies.”

A company spokesperson, Sarah ‌De Meester, said the range of fresh and frozen products was “temporarily somewhat limited” in affected shops, but that distribution centres were operating normally and there was no disruption to deliveries.

Belgium’s Le Soir newspaper reported that dozens of shops and supermarkets had been affected, including five Spar outlets, Shop & Go convenience shops attached to Q8 service stations and some smaller Proxy Delhaize mini-markets.

“We started mobilising technicians at 1am,” Stephan Moelans, the chief executive of Sabcobel, which operates Delhaize’s refrigeration systems, told the paper. “We spent all night and morning disconnecting the affected installations.”

He told the Belga news agency the ‌incident had been a cyber-attack and that the units’ evaporators were switched to defrost mode.

The Colruyt and Intermarché supermarket chains also said they had been hit by technical problems affecting fridges in five and 15 of their shops respectively, and Carrefour Belgium reported disruption in about 15 of its 700 shops.

Shop fridges and freezers across Europe hit by fresh suspected cyber-attack

Chains in seven countries say cooling unit temperatures rose overnight in incident similar to hack of French stores

the Guardian (www.theguardian.com)