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France's cybersecurity agency is investigating a cyberattack on supermarket freezers. Millions of tons of food went bad. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports from Paris.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Cyril Scheubel manages a large Intermarche supermarket outside the French city of Dijon. He got a call about 4 a.m. Monday from a surveillance company that told him temperatures were rising in the store's freezers and cold rooms.
CYRIL SCHEUBEL: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "I got in my car right away and went to the store," he says. "When I opened the freezers, there was no more cold - just hot air coming out."
Some 500 to 700 stores in France were hit between Sunday night and Monday morning, according to authorities. Julien Coulon runs a tech investment fund and has also been working in the internet industry since 1992.
JULIEN COULON: As far as we know, all those freezer were connected to the internet. The hackers took over and transformed the freezer into heaters.
BEARDSLEY: The stores all used a Danish company to manage their freezers. Coulon says those hit had not updated the software, which let the hackers take control and raise temperatures from minus 4 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of hours. It's a wake-up call, said Dominique Schelcher, head of supermarket chain Cooperative U, speaking on RTL radio.
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DOMINIQUE SCHELCHER: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "This attack should make us question our very food security and sovereignty," he said.
Store manager Scheubel says the attack was scarily targeted.
SCHEUBEL: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "All of our computer data is very well-protected," he says. "These hackers hit the only vulnerable point of our stores."
While there are no culprits so far, Coulon told NPR he has a few ideas.
COULON: What is weird is that those hackers didn't ask for any money so far. And of course, we can quickly make a shortcut, thinking that we have our French election coming soon, and there is always a good way to destabilize a country.
BEARDSLEY: He says incidents like this will only increase with AI, which will sniff out new hacking opportunities like software that hasn't been updated.
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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