On October 12, hundreds of supermarket workers arrived to restock fridges and freezers and found many as hot as ovens instead of cold. A hack targeting 700 stores breached temperature-control software and cranked thermostats as high as 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight, in some cases cooking food left inside.
A series of major cyberattacks has left France looking, to some analysts, like the most heavily hacked country in Europe, with the latest strike heating supermarket refrigerators across hundreds of stores.
Cybersecurity firm UpGuard described France as the most heavily breached large jurisdiction in Europe, France 24 reported. Other analysts have called the run of incidents unprecedented. France is not Europe's only target, however, and by some measures it is not the largest.
Danfoss said most of the attacks, which breached software that lets retailers manage cold units remotely, targeted out-of-date products that no longer receive software or security updates.
The fridge attack did not stay in France. In November it was replicated in Belgium, Luxembourg, Finland, Estonia and Sweden."France was where it started, not where it ends,"said Dennis-Kenji Kipker, research director and founder of the cyberintelligence.institute in Frankfurt.
The supermarket incident followed other large-scale attacks on French companies, public service providers and government departments. In August, in the most recent attack on the government, the finance ministry notified nearly 680,000 taxpayers that their personal and tax information had been stolen and offered for sale online.
Over the past five years, successful hacks have stolen data from the unemployment agency, the immigration office, the education ministry, the national agency for identity documents and public hospitals.
Kipker said France is"unusually attractive"to hackers on several fronts. Potential rewards are high because it is"a highly centralised state, so one break-in at a health software supplier or the national job agency yields millions of records at once,"he said.
Social unrest, including ongoing cost-of-living protests, may also lead hackers to believe that attacks meant to unsettle the public and destabilise the government will work. Visible attempts at destabilisation have targeted other countries as well.
With attacks rising globally as criminals use artificial intelligence to scale operations, the security challenges are becoming"more urgent,"Pilling said, and hacks look likely to remain a fact of life. Even so,"the basics of good cyber hygiene still prevent a great deal of opportunistic cybercrime,"Pilling said.
One stated realistic goal is that an intrusion at a supplier stays an incident and never becomes a blackout, a spoiled supermarket or a leaked medical file."France must now urgently catch up in the race between cyber defenders and cybercriminals, and hold both operators and manufacturers in the digital supply chain more strictly to account,"Kipker said.