France accuses Iran's Revolutionary Guard of large-scale supermarket cyberattack

French prosecutors announced that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was responsible for a cyberattack that targeted the refrigeration systems of roughly 700 supermarkets across the country on Oct. 12. The intrusion caused freezer and fridge temperatures to rise to about 50 °C for six hours, forcing retailers to discard fresh and frozen goods and resulting in losses estimated in the tens of millions of euros.

Prosecutor Laure Beccuau said investigators identified Farsi language use and IP addresses linked to devices in Iran, and she said France is seeking international arrest warrants for the perpetrators. France’s national cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, attributed the operation to the Shahid Kaveh group, a cyber unit associated with the Revolutionary Guard.

"This is an attack of unprecedented scale and aggressiveness," French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on the sidelines of the G7 meeting in Paris, adding that the Iranian ambassador would be summoned to protest the act.

Barrot warned that the sabotage represented a major threat to national interests and pledged European-level sanctions against those responsible. The incident follows a thwarted attempt last week to raise temperatures in French blood banks and similar freezer disruptions reported in supermarkets in Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland and Estonia.

French authorities and Paris prosecutors continue to investigate the attack.