France blames IRGC for attacks on refrigeration systems

France has formally attributed a large-scale industrial intrusion campaign to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), with investigators linking the operation to the Shahid Kaveh cyber collective. Officials say the sabotage targeted commercial refrigeration systems across around 700 French facilities in mid-October, causing altered cooling parameters that spoiled perishable food and sparked at least 15 electrical fires. The Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs summoned the Iranian ambassador and urged EU sanctions.

Forensic work indicates the intrusion occurred between 11 and 12 October, when hostile operators breached industrial refrigeration controllers and remotely altered configuration settings to force perpetual defrost modes, rapidly raising interior temperatures and disabling preservation compressors. CERT-FR’s technical CTI report is cited as documenting the abrupt thermal spikes.

The disruptions affected not only supermarket chains but also independent butcher shops, slaughterhouses, and processing plants, with cumulative damages said to exceed tens of millions of euros. French intelligence additionally attributed the operation to Shahid Kaveh, noting overlapping reconnaissance infrastructure and Persian-language traces.

An expansion of suspected activity followed into Europe, with anomalous refrigeration disruptions appearing in Belgium, Sweden and Luxembourg, and probes into French blood transfusion facilities. Protective segmentation limited further impact on some municipal assets. European authorities are auditing public-facing PLCs across food networks, and officials emphasise strong network segmentation and restricted external access to industrial control interfaces as part of the response.