France has found Iran responsible for a cyberattack on supermarket refrigerators across the country, the French foreign minister said Monday.
Nearly 700 food-distribution sites were targeted across France over two days in “an attack of unprecedented scope and aggressiveness,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot told reporters. Major grocery stores had to throw out spoiled goods last month after hackers changed temperature settings remotely.
“I can confirm that responsibility for this attack lies with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,” Barrot said at a meeting of the Group of Seven nations in Paris. “It marks the first large-scale cyberattack aimed at sabotage on our national territory.”
While he was referring specifically to the cases in France, grocery stores in several European countries including Belgium, Italy and Sweden have since reported hacks.
No one has claimed responsibility.
Iran has not responded publicly to the allegation.
Barrot pledged consequences. “We will impose sanctions at the European level against all those responsible, and we will take all other proportionate and necessary measures, public or not, to respond,” he said, without providing further details.
French prosecutors said they have launched an investigation into the hacks.
The European Union’s food and agriculture commissioner, Christophe Hansen, has said the bloc is taking the incidents “very seriously” and sees them as a “deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain.”
The supermarket incidents come at a time of mounting warnings from European officials of possible acts of sabotage. In recent weeks, a spate of unidentified bomb threats have disrupted flights around Europe in a suspected hoax campaign. European officials have not assigned blame.
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