A New Cold War: Iran Defrosts American and European Supermarket Freezers

It has been dubbed ‘the new Cold War.’ Supermarket managers come to work to discover that hackers penetrated their systems long distance, switching settings, and cranking up freezer temperatures to 122 F.In August, six commissaries on military bases across the US were hit. In October, 700 supermarkets in France were hit. Television news showed managers throwing out hundreds of millions of dollars of spoiled meat and melted ice cream. Last week, hackers across seven European countries switched hundreds of supermarket freezers to defrost. At the same time, hackers hit three French blood banks. No plasma was damaged, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s blood boiled. “What kind of sickos are these people? They attack refrigerators,” he exclaimed Monday at Paris. He spoke alongside French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot at a meeting of the Group of Seven foreign ministers.Mr. Barrot announced that French intelligence has traced the attack to Shahid Kaveh, a cyber unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a military force that answers directly to the nation’s religious authorities. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said she is seeking international arrest warrants for three principals in the unit: Hamid Reza Lashgarian, Mahdi Lashgarian and Reza Salarvand.“This is the first large-scale cyberattack carried out for the purpose of sabotage on national territory, and it constitutes a major threat to the nation’s interests and the security of the French people,” Minister Barrot said. “It will not go unpunished.”In the age of artificial intelligence, the freezer attacks are comparatively low tech. Hackers seek out older models that often are not updated, or ‘patched,’ to close doors open to bad actors surfing the internet. Sometimes, they use the original default passwords. About a decade ago, industrial freezers became linked to the internet in order to allow supermarket managers to remotely monitor and control temperatures.By disabling alarms and setting temperatures as high as possible, saboteurs caused compressors to burn out, setting off fires in at least 15 stores. American investigators also are looking at an Iranian link to the attacks on American bases. Around the time of base attacks, Iranian hackers carried out disruptive attacks on U.S. water treatment plants, experts say. Last spring, in Israel, the Iranian cyber unit claimed authorship of attacks on a chain of kosher food stores and on the industrial freezers of an Israeli food production company. French cyber sleuths say they zeroed in on Shahid Kaveh by matching patterns of the French intrusions to other hacks carried out by the Iranians. They also recovered traces of Farsi in the attack infrastructure.The goal appears to be to achieve a psychological blow against the West at a low cost. By contrast, need for money apparently motivated North Korea to steal $6 billion in cyber currencies on Oct. 29 from Binance. The FBI issued a press release listing the addresses that North Korea may use to launder the stolen cyber assets.The supermarket attackers have not demanded ransoms. Instead, by hitting high profile targets, they win headlines and cause angst across Europe and the United States. In the age of the internet of things, people worry that their TVs, front door locks, and residential furnaces could suddenly go haywire.While these household appliances are hackable, cyber security analysts say they rarely are worth the trouble. However, sabotaging supermarkets can be as powerful as sabotaging a water supply system or a power plant. “Food security requires more attention at all levels,” European Food Commissioner Christophe Hansen posted on X after attack hit freezers in about 7 percent of France’s supermarkets. “The weaponization of food has become a reality.”Last Thursday, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, warned American companies that use cold storage that “malicious cyber actors” seek to “exploit vulnerabilities or weaknesses in unpatched or internet-accessible controllers to remotely alter settings and force units into continuous heating and defrost cycles.”French Foreign Minister Barrot warned yesterday: “This attack is unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression. We will implement sanctions at the European level against all those responsible for this attack.”

A New Cold War: Iran Defrosts American and European Supermarket Freezers

A New Cold War: Iran Defrosts American and European Supermarket Freezers

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