What happened
On the night of 11 October 2026, refrigeration systems in more than 500 shops and supermarkets across France were driven up to 50°C while the stores were closed. Staff arrived in the morning to melted stock. In some stores, equipment caught fire.
Intermarché, Netto, Carrefour, Coopérative U and Monoprix all reported stores hit. Intermarché’s owner told Reuters that freezers in about 150 of its stores were held at 50°C for six hours. Its chief executive put the losses at “tens of millions of euros nationwide in a single day”.
Nobody stole a file. Nobody locked a computer. The attackers changed one number on a controller.
How it worked
Each store’s freezers answer to one control panel. Many of those panels sit on the open internet so that maintenance firms can adjust them from anywhere. That door was built for the repair technician. Anyone who finds it can walk through it.
France’s cybersecurity agency named the equipment as Danfoss refrigeration controllers. Danfoss said most of the affected systems were legacy products running outdated firmware. At the time of writing, investigators had not confirmed exactly how the attackers got in.
Why it matters here
The fix most people reach for when food spoils before it reaches the plate is cold storage, and the new cold rooms going up in Lagos are increasingly run from phones and dashboards.
That is good engineering, until the controller is reachable by anyone. Every cold room connected without protection is a door like the ones in France.
Five checks for any connected cold room
- Take the controller off the open internet, or lock it to addresses you know.
- One login per technician, through one managed door. No shared or default passwords. Change them now.
- Update the firmware, and set a date to replace any unit the maker no longer supports.
- Add an alarm the controller does not control. A hacked panel can report a false temperature. A separate sensor that sends you an SMS cannot be fooled the same way.
- Write down everyone with remote access, and review the list every month.
Who can switch off your freezers right now?
If you cannot name every person and company with remote access to your cold room, start there. Send us your controller’s make and model and we will tell you what to check first.