Hackers forced fridges and freezers in supermarkets across at least five European countries to heat up overnight on Monday, spoiling food and forcing stores to throw stock away, in a second wave of attacks only weeks after hundreds of French stores were hit.
The attack struck from Sweden to Belgium, hitting dozens of stores belonging to Ahold Delhaize and Colruyt in Belgium and Luxembourg, Swedish grocers ICA and Coop, and Musgrave’s SuperValu stores in Ireland. Carrefour said 15 of its more than 700 stores in Belgium were affected, IKEA said one Belgian store was hit, and a supermarket in Estonia was also affected.
In several cases temperatures rose to 50 degrees Celsius. The refrigeration contractor that operates Delhaize’s systems in Belgium, Sabcobel, said the units’ evaporators had been switched into defrost mode, and its teams spent the night and morning disconnecting affected installations. At least some of the units hit used temperature-control technology from Danish firm Danfoss, also targeted in the French attack last month; Danfoss said it had been working with customers on fixes.
For shopkeepers, the damage was immediate. Engla Ingwall, sales manager at an ICA franchise store in Stockholm, said the attack struck at 2 a.m. but was only noticed hours later. “Everything is destroyed,” she said, adding that all the store’s freezers had reached 50 degrees. In Belgium, butcher Luc De Laet said he was woken at 3:30 a.m., rushed to his shop south of Antwerp and found fridges as high as 18 degrees, ruining about 15,000 euros’ worth of meat. “It’s very scary,” he said. “They are hacking the system that is doing the registration of the temperature, and they can program it at a distance.”
No group has claimed responsibility, and it has not been established who was behind Monday’s attacks or whether they were linked to the French incidents. Katrien Eggers, spokesperson for Belgium’s Centre for Cybersecurity, said it was not known who was responsible and “it may never be determined”. Cybersecurity researcher Tom Hegel said the absence of financial demands pointed instead to sabotage, and that retail chains were an easy target because they run vast estates of connected refrigeration controllers that are hard to trace once an attacker logs into an exposed control panel.
The European Commission said the incidents showed how digital threats were becoming increasingly disruptive. Christophe Hansen, the EU commissioner for agriculture, called them “a deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain and undermine consumers’ confidence in it”. In Ireland, Musgrave said on Monday afternoon that the incident had been fully resolved and replenishment was well under way.
Last month, French police said hackers had seized control of cooling units at hundreds of supermarkets, in some cases pushing temperatures from as low as minus 27 degrees to well over 50 degrees, causing fires and food losses. Monday’s wave suggests the vulnerability has not been closed, even after retailers and suppliers began work on fixes following the French attack.
Sources: Reuters, “New cyberattack on supermarket fridges sweeps across Europe”, 2 November 2026, https://wncy.com/2026/11/02/temperature-soars-at-swedish-grocery-store-freezers-one-store-blames-hackers/; Associated Press, “Supermarket freezers in several European countries hit by apparent cyberattacks”, 2 November 2026, https://techxplore.com/news/2026-11-supermarket-freezers-european-countries-apparent.html
