Dozens of supermarket freezers across seven European countries have been hit by a cyber-attack that forced shops to dump food, the BBC reports.

Around 40 Delhaize stores in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected, with smaller numbers hit in Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland. Belgian firm Sabcobel, which makes some of the units, said evaporators were switched to defrost mode so they warmed up — the same method believed used last month against hundreds of French supermarkets, when millions of euros of food were discarded.

Sabcobel CEO Stephan Moelans told Belga the company had been “working all night and morning to disconnect the affected units from the network.” Since the French attack in early October it had tried to “protect our customers’ fridges against this vulnerability,” but units need physical changes, not only software updates.

Most European supermarket fridges are internet-linked so maintenance can be done remotely. “The simplest solution is to manage the fridges over a secure internet connection. Most of our customers switched to that after the attack in France,” Moelans said.

Freezer temperatures in several shops reportedly rose as high as 50C (122F). Belgium’s and Sweden’s national cyber-security agencies said they were monitoring the incident.

In the US, authorities are investigating refrigeration failures at American military bases in August and working with French officials on whether the episodes could be linked.

Source consulted: Shop freezers in seven European countries hit by cyber-attack — BBC.

Image: supermarket freezer aisle (Wikimedia Commons, CC0).

Sources consulted: Shop freezers in seven European countries hit by cyber-attack — BBC.