Hackers Spoiled Food at 60 Belgian Supermarkets by Overheating Their Freezers

A cyberattack remotely raised the temperature inside refrigerators and freezers at roughly 60 Belgian supermarkets overnight into Monday, spoiling food at stores run by Ahold Delhaize and Colruyt. Reports point to about 40 Delhaize locations, 15 Carrefour stores and 5 Spar outlets affected, with units pushed as high as 50 degrees Celsius, enough to rapidly defrost and ruin their contents.

Belgium was one of at least eleven European countries to report similar incidents, alongside Sweden, where Coop and ICA stores were hit, Luxembourg, Estonia, Ireland, where grocery group Musgrave confirmed 13 SuperValu stores affected, the Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Germany, Romania and the United Kingdom. Italian officials counted about 20 affected supermarkets, including four of Coop's roughly 300 Sicilian stores, while Romania reported six and Germany four, and UK incidents centered on small meat processing firms rather than retail chains directly.

Brussels calls for a coordinated response

European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said the attacks were not isolated incidents and that the bloc needs to be collectively resilient to this kind of disruption, promising coordination with national authorities as investigations continue. No group has claimed responsibility, and Romanian cybersecurity official Dan Cimpean said he did not suspect state involvement, describing the intrusions as semi amateurish rather than the work of a sophisticated actor.

The incident echoes a cyberattack on French supermarkets in October that similarly spread across several European countries, suggesting attackers have found refrigeration control systems, often connected to the internet with weaker security than core retail networks, to be a repeatable and disruptive target even without the technical sophistication of a major ransomware operation.