France Accuses Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of Cyberattack That Spoiled Food at 700 Supermarkets
France said Iran's Revolutionary Guards were behind October cyberattacks that shut down refrigeration at about 700 supermarkets, spoiling food and starting fires. Paris summoned Iran's ambassador and said it would seek EU sanctions.
PARIS — France on Monday accused Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of carrying out cyberattacks last month that shut down refrigeration systems at about 700 supermarkets across the country, spoiling food and starting fires.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot called the attacks “an attack of unprecedented scale and unprecedented aggressiveness” and said they were the first large-scale cyberattack carried out for sabotage on French territory. France summoned Iran’s ambassador and said it would seek retaliatory sanctions against Iran at the European level, Barrot said.
The attacks, which hit stores in early October, were carried out by hackers who connected remotely to supermarket refrigerators and freezers and raised their temperature by switching on defrost cycles, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV. The damage included the loss of large amounts of fresh and frozen food, and some refrigeration equipment caught fire.
A report released Monday by France’s Cyber Crisis Coordination Centre put the number of fires at 15 and food losses in the tens of millions of euros, according to The Register. The chains affected included Casino, Leclerc, Coopérative U, Metro, Carrefour and Intermarché.
Paris names the unit it blames
French officials blamed the attacks on Shahid Kaveh, a cyber unit tied to the Revolutionary Guards, and named three men they said were involved: Hamid Reza Lashgarian, Mahdi Lashgarian and Reza Salarvand, according to Reuters. The Paris prosecutor’s office said it had opened an investigation into the head of the unit and his two deputies.
Investigators cited the use of Farsi and IP addresses pointing to devices in Iran, the prosecutor’s office said. France’s report also said the attack infrastructure had been used to scan Schneider Electric equipment and that the techniques matched those used by the Shahid Kaveh unit since at least April 2026, according to The Register.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not return messages seeking comment, Reuters reported. Iran routinely denies carrying out malicious cyber operations, and Tehran had not commented on the French allegations, according to CNN.
Similar attacks reported in other European countries
Similar cyberattacks on supermarket refrigeration were reported in early November in Sweden, Belgium, Ireland and Luxembourg, with stores reporting food losses after temperatures were pushed as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit, The Register reported. It was not clear whether those attacks were linked to the ones in France.
The French government said it would use “all available means of response” and reserved the right to take further measures, public and non-public, it deemed necessary and proportionate. The U.S. federal government last week urged owners and operators to take steps to guard against this type of attack spreading to America, The Register reported.
Reporting based on coverage by CNN, Reuters and The Register.
