France blames Iran for supermarket hack meltdowns
France has turned up the heat on Iran over destructive cyberattacks targeting refrigeration controllers at more than 700 grocery stores in October, spoiling food and sparking fires.
Key points
- France said the cyber unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps carried out an "unprecedented campaign" that caused millions of euros in damage.
- “This is an unprecedented campaign in terms of its scale and level of aggressiveness, thus constituting the first cyber offensive campaign carried out purely for the purpose of sabotage on national territory,” France’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
- The IRGC-affiliated hacking crew has been breaking into industrial controllers for years, and in 2023, American national security and law enforcement agencies attributed a series of cyberattacks against "multiple" US water facilities to CyberAv3ngers.
France also vowed to express “its strongest condemnation of these cyberattacks” to the Iranian ambassador.
The C4 includes the National Cybersecurity Agency of France, the Directorate General for External Security, the Directorate General for Internal Security, the Directorate General for Armament, and the Cyber Defence Command.
Additional details
- Making the case for attribution First: the infrastructure used to carry out the October supermarket attacks was also used during this timeframe to conduct reconnaissance on Schneider Electric equipment, zeroing in on small- and medium-sized energy and water production units.
- However, the country didn’t rule out responding with more than just harsh words: “France reserves the right to take any additional measures, public and non-public, deemed necessary and proportionate to respond to these….
- While the US government hasn’t attributed the intrusions to any country or group, private-sector security analysts blamed Iran, and specifically CyberAv3ngers.
- All signs point to CyberAv3ngers Both the report and the statement attributed the refrigeration controller hacks to the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Shahid Kaveh cyber unit.
- The Shahid Kaveh unit, which French national security officials say is led by Reza Salarvand and Mahdi Lashgarian, is better known by its hacktivist personas, including CyberAv3ngers.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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