France Accuses Iran's Revolutionary Guards of Cyberattacks That Disabled Supermarket Refrigerators

In the middle of a G7 foreign ministers' meeting in Paris, France's foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot said he could confirm who was behind a wave of cyberattacks that had left French supermarkets with warming refrigerators and spoiled stock. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, he said, carried it out. The announcement came on Tuesday, Australian eastern time.

The attacks took place on 11 and 12 October. Swathes of French supermarkets were affected, with temperatures rising inside their refrigerators. In some cases stores were forced to throw away entire inventories of perishable food. Barrot said the operation targeted 700 sites, and called it unprecedented in both scale and aggression. He described it as the first large-scale cyberattack aimed at sabotage on French national territory, and a major attack on the nation's interests and the security of the French people.

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau issued a separate statement saying a judicial investigation had been opened into Shahid Kaveh, a cyber unit of the IRGC. She described it as an offensive cyber unit affiliated with the IRGC's Electronic and Cyber Centre. The investigation names the unit's head and his two deputies, though Beccuau did not identify the three individuals. Little is publicly known about Shahid Kaveh, although analysts have long observed that the IRGC, with its vast network of operations, has expanded into cyber warfare in recent years.

Beccuau laid out what points to the unit. A hallmark of its methods, she said, is the use of the Persian language and IP addresses that trace back to terminals located in Iran. As for the mechanics, the attackers took control of the equipment remotely through web interfaces and triggered abnormal, indefinite defrost cycles. At the same time, the security alerts built into sensors, which are meant to go off when temperatures pass a set threshold, were disabled simultaneously.

France has summoned the Iranian ambassador in Paris to deliver what Barrot called a very strong protest against an extremely grave act. He promised sanctions at the European level against all those responsible, and said France would take any other necessary and proportionate measures, whether public or otherwise, to respond and deter anyone who might try to repeat it. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, speaking after him, said the response should be strong, adding that she had only just learnt of the attribution to Iran. Iranian officials have not publicly commented on the French allegations.

Barrot referred directly only to the attacks on French supermarkets, but similar incidents have been reported elsewhere. On 2 November, grocery stores in at least nine other European countries were hit by a suspected cyberattack on their freezer systems. The episodes have unsettled Europe at a time when officials have warned of cyber threats from Russia, as European countries press their support for Ukraine in its war with Moscow. European air traffic has also been disrupted in recent days by false bomb alerts against dozens of flights, though their origin has not been made clear.

The backdrop with Iran is tense. The United States and Israel began a war against Iran on 28 February by killing its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. European countries stayed out of that conflict, but French officials have accused Iran of spreading misinformation tied to the protests that have rocked France over the past month.

What to watch next: whether the EU turns Barrot's promise into formal sanctions, whether the November incidents in nine other countries are attributed to the same actor, and whether Tehran responds.