France Says Iran Behind Supermarket Sabotage Fridge Hack
A unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRGC) is responsible for a massive cyber attack on European retailers which led to the loss of millions of Euros of food last month.
A massive, if comparatively unsophisticated hack of the software controlling supermarket chillers across several European states last month was the work of Iranian saboteurs working for the IRGC, the French government has said.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot was unequivocal in his remarks, stating not that the security services had their suspicions, but that they were certain that Iran was responsible. He said: “I can confirm that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran is responsible for this attack. It is an attack of unprecedented scale and aggression”, reports the BBC.
Barrot said the “destabilisation” attack, which caused fridges in hundreds of supermarkets across Europe to go into self-cleaning mode, destroying the food within with high heat, was the first time a large-scale cyberattack had committed sabotage on French territory against “the nation’s interests and the security of the French people.”
While the Iranian ambassador had been summoned for a dressing down, perhaps more importantly Barrot’s ministry added it reserved the right to also engage in any “non-public measures deemed necessary” to respond to the attack.
The public prosecutor in Paris said it had identified IRGC group Shahid Kaveh and was investigating its leaders. The office said it was preparing to issue arrest warrants, although if the Sahid Kaveh group operates within Iran, that may be more of a symbolic act for now.
Among the evidence supporting these claims, the prosecutor said, was the use of the Farsi language among the hackers, and Iranian IP addresses.
French broadsheet Le Figaro reports unidentified security sources that told it “We know the names of their leaders and the aliases they use… It is rare for France to attribute a cyberattack in this way. We are doing so because of the particular gravity of the events”.
Barrot’s attribution of blame applies only to the first round of refrigerator hacks that took place in Europe in mid-October. Since then, a second round of hacks that impacts food businesses, defrosting chilled and frozen food and so rendering it unfit for human consumption took place in early November.
In addition, in America consideration is being given to whether fridge malfunctions providing daily meals for U.S. military and even blood bank vaults have been apparently targeted, putting the safety of enormously valuable, life-saving stocks of blood at risk. It is not clear whether all of these events are definitely linked, but the attacks on around 1,000 supermarkets across Europe within weeks of each other, followed by France’s accusation at Iran, has triggered inevitable speculation.
The attacks themselves, security experts state, were not particularly technologically sophisticated and relied on unprotected networked devices using un-upgraded or even obsolete software to control critical refrigeration across entire businesses.
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