How to shut down 300 supermarkets without walking into any of them
On the night between 11 and 12 October 2026, fridges and freezers in hundreds of French supermarkets started heating up: up to 50 °C, with defrosting switched on. Coopérative U, Intermarché/Netto and E.Leclerc confirmed they were hit. A single store threw away around €220,000 of goods, and the Paris prosecutor is also investigating some small fires.
How they got in
Not through the stores, but through the software a supplier uses to manage refrigeration systems remotely. The attackers exploited a known flaw in old versions of that software: the manufacturer had warned customers in August to update, and many of the affected systems were so old they no longer received updates.
The lesson for businesses
The weak spot is often not your computer: it is the internet-connected machine nobody thinks of as a computer. Fridges, cameras, boilers, tills. List what is connected, keep it updated, and isolate from the network or replace whatever no longer receives updates.
Source: Il Post, 12/10/2026