British food businesses were among those affected by a major cyberattack targeting supermarket refrigeration systems across Europe, the head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has confirmed.
Suspected cyber-terrorists have targeted at least seven countries, in some cases forcing chiller temperatures as high as 55C (131F).
Dr Richard Horne, director of the NCSC, which operates within GCHQ, said “vulnerable technology” in the UK had been “exploited” during the attacks.
Security sources told the Daily Mail that only a small number of British companies had been affected and said no major supermarket was understood to have been hit.
A London fruit and vegetable wholesaler narrowly avoided a major loss after staff disconnected its refrigerators from the internet, cutting off the attackers’ access.
Dr Horne said: “We don’t know the full impact, but we can see there are a couple of instances where vulnerable technology has been exploited, and we will be working with those organisations to understand more.”
He said it was “too early for us to say” who was responsible and that authorities could not yet “give a definitive answer” about the source of the cyberattack.
Dozens of stores in Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, Luxembourg and Estonia have been targeted, just weeks after hackers raised the temperatures of cooling units at hundreds of French grocery stores.
The latest attacks involved refrigeration units made by Belgian company Sabcobel. The firm said their evaporators had been switched into defrost mode, sending temperatures in some units from -27C (-17F) to 50C (122F) and destroying tonnes of meat.
Dr Richard Horne, head of the National Cyber Security Centre, said UK firms had been affected by the European supermarket freezer hack
Employees had to dispose of bags of spoiled food at an ICA supermarket in Sweden
The technique resembles last month’s attack on French supermarkets, which resulted in millions of euros’ worth of food being discarded and even sparked several small fires.
Those incidents involved refrigerators supplied by Danfoss, a company that also works with British supermarket chains including Tesco and Sainsbury’s.
About 40 Delhaize and Colruyt supermarkets in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected, as well as 15 Carrefour stores.
Tony Goodger, from the British group Association of Independent Meat Suppliers (Aims), said several of its 300 members had “unexpectedly become collateral” in the European attack, with refrigeration units heating up overnight.
One meat supply company reportedly saw its cold-storage units reach up to 100C (212F), while two others said their units had begun defrosting.
However, Aims said the units were empty at the time because of the way abattoirs are generally operated, meaning no food products were affected.
Langridge Organic, a London fruit and vegetable wholesaler, was also targeted but stopped the incident from escalating by unplugging its cold-storage units from the internet.
Alex Pearce, the company’s managing director, said hackers had attempted to set the six units to defrost at 150C for more than four hours. Quick-thinking employees intervened, and no produce was lost.
“It clearly must have been easy to get in [to the system] because the simple solution was to unplug ourselves from the internet,” he said.
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He added the company used the same fridge control system, developed by American software firm Copeland, which was involved in the French supermarket incidents.
Dr Horne told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘It’s not just supermarkets, it’s through the whole food supply chain, and we’ve been working through the night alerting organisations where we can see they’ve got exposed technology that’s vulnerable in this way.
‘So there are handfuls of organisations in the UK we’ve alerted and we’re aware of a couple of impacts.’
An employee cleans fridges that had been hacked at an ICA store in Stockholm
An NCSC official told the Daily Mail: ‘We are aware of a small number of UK organisations that may be affected by this incident as a result of vulnerabilities on their systems, and the NCSC is supporting those that may be impacted.
‘We continue to liaise with our international partners and the affected sectors to understand and mitigate its impact.’
News of the incident came as Dr Horne warned in a speech today that Britain was facing a moment of ‘enormous consequence’ for cyber-security.
The UK has got away with doing ‘tech on the cheap’ for decades, he said, as the NCSC’s annual report suggests Britain faced being bombarded by AI-powered attacks on critical national infrastructure in the next two years.
Hackers demanding ransom payments are ‘highly likely’ to use the technology to target the UK by 2028 and hostile states such as Russia and China will routinely use the technology to pursue their goals by then, the report found.
In a speech launching the report today, Dr Horne said: ‘It is clear that our nation is living through a moment that, in hindsight, we will see as one of enormous consequence.
‘A “sliding doors” moment. A moment of choice. In the coming months, we face a real prospect of an unprecedented rise in the number of cyber-incidents.
‘But we must be clear that is not because AI has invented new ways to attack us, but because vulnerabilities that have been tolerated for far too long can now be discovered and exploited at a scale that was once unimaginable.’
His intervention came just days after Defence Secretary Wes Streeting warned Britain must be ready for war within the next 1,000 days.
At the same time, the Government launched a new resilience drive, urging Britons to stockpile enough food and water for three days.
Dr Horne added: ‘For decades, we have collectively got away with doing tech on the cheap.
‘End-of-life systems kept running for just one more year, well-needed upgrades pushed back as a “cost efficiency”, and technology providers failing to invest in security by design and default.’
The NCSC annual report said its incident management team received 1,831 reports of cyber attacks this year, of which 337 required support and 80 were nationally significant.
It also warned that 8,500 organisations when their systems had been compromised by attackers, the report added.
Almost half of small firms in the UK (46 per cent) have been targeted by cyber criminals in the past year, with nearly one in five (18 per cent) going bankrupt following a cyber attack, according to research by Mastercard.
The study added that more than three in five small to medium-sized companies – about 3.4million – in the UK did not use any cyber-security tools.