France accuses Iran's Revolutionary Guard of cyberattack on supermarket refrigerators

France on Monday held Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for a cyberattack last month that overheated refrigeration units in supermarkets nationwide. Paris called in Iran's ambassador and said it would push for European Union sanctions, according to PBS NewsHour, which published an Associated Press report.

Jean-Noël Barrot, France's top diplomat, addressed the matter while G7 meetings were underway in the French capital. He described the incident as the first major sabotage-focused cyber operation carried out on French territory. "This is an attack of unprecedented scale and aggressiveness," Barrot said, as reported by PBS NewsHour. He added: "We will impose sanctions at the European level against all those responsible for this attack."

Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, announced a formal judicial probe into suspected organized cybercrime allegedly conducted to benefit a foreign state. The inquiry focuses on the head of a unit known as Shahid Kaveh and two of his deputies, both outlets reported. ANSSI, the French government's cybersecurity agency, tied that unit to the Guard. Prosecutors also want arrest warrants issued internationally, PBS NewsHour said.

The two outlets give different pictures of what evidence France has shared. According to PBS NewsHour, Beccuau said the hackers worked in Farsi and relied on internet addresses traced to machines inside Iran. The BBC, by contrast, wrote that officials had not described how they reached their conclusion, and it pointed out that hackers can conceal where they are operating from.

Tehran had not issued an official reply, the BBC reported, though some Iranian media dismissed the accusations as unfounded. Two hacktivist groups aligned with Russia had previously said they were behind the attacks, but the BBC said those claims drew little belief.

The outlets also disagree on the date and reach of the attack. PBS NewsHour put it before dawn on Oct. 12, saying roughly 700 of France's 10,000 supermarkets were affected. The BBC dated it to Oct. 11 and counted over 100 Coopérative U locations plus 180 Intermarché and Netto stores, with Carrefour, Monoprix and E.Leclerc also hit. The BBC said the intruders exploited software from Danish company Danfoss that lets retailers control cooling equipment remotely.

Some units climbed to around 50 degrees Celsius, and stores had to discard chilled and frozen products. Intermarché put its one-day losses in the tens of millions of euros, PBS NewsHour reported.

A later round of attacks struck stores elsewhere in Europe, including Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland and Estonia, the outlets said. The BBC noted it is unclear whether the incidents are related. PBS NewsHour separately described a failed attempt last week to heat storage at several French blood banks.

ANSSI has linked earlier attacks on France since 2020, among them incidents involving Charlie Hebdo and the Paris Olympics organizers, to a different Guard-affiliated group, according to PBS NewsHour.

Compiled by True News from reporting by PBS NewsHour and BBC News. Each outlet's original story is linked below.

Originally published by True News: https://truenews.bagleyenterprises.net/stories/914