Hackers switched refrigeration units in supermarkets in North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Bavaria from cooling to heating overnight, spoiling large quantities of food. According to tagesschau.de, those affected are two CAP supermarkets in Wuppertal and Wetter-Volmarstein in the Ennepe-Ruhr district, a Rewe store in Raesfeld in the Münsterland region, an Edeka store in Lilienthal near Bremen and an Edeka branch in Reisbach in Lower Bavaria. The attacks became known on Tuesday, 3 November.
In Lilienthal, according to the owner, he measured 70 degrees Celsius in the fresh-food counter in the morning and 30 degrees Celsius in the cold stores. “We had to throw away goods worth more than €360,000,” owner Daniel Breiding said, according to a report by the news agency dpa. “None of it was saleable any more.” A whole container of food was disposed of, tagesschau.de reports. According to dpa, the store manager filed a criminal complaint; the investigation was taken over by the Oldenburg Central Criminal Investigation Department, which according to its own information is also examining another case in Diepholz.
In Reisbach in the Dingolfing-Landau district, according to the operator, the attackers switched the refrigeration units to “heating at 50 degrees” during the night. “Foodsharing quickly collected everything that could somehow still be saved,” Edeka Ernst said, “but unfortunately a large part of the goods had to be disposed of. It simply makes us furious.” According to the Lower Bavaria police headquarters, the criminal police in Landshut are investigating on suspicion of spying out data and altering data and, according to a spokesperson, intend to coordinate with the authorities in the other federal states.
In Wuppertal, the CAP store wrote on Facebook that an “external access at the weekend” had led to freezer and refrigeration units being “too warm this morning”. “All items had to be and now have to be disposed of.” A spokesperson for the Wuppertal police told t-online that someone had come to the station on Monday afternoon to file a complaint. A regional manager of Arbeiterwohlfahrt, which operates the CAP stores, confirmed the attack in Wetter-Volmarstein to dpa. Refrigerated shelves as well as storage areas were affected; the actual attack was on the company that maintains the refrigeration units remotely. The amount of damage cannot yet be quantified.
How the perpetrators operate
According to cybersecurity expert Hans-Walter Borries, it was “a very targeted and very massive attack”. The executive director of the Institute for Security Studies Firmitas considers refrigeration units a perfect target for criminals: “We can assume that this was only the beginning; we will see further waves of attacks in Germany too,” he told Handelsblatt. According to reports, the perpetrators apparently exploited a similar vulnerability as in the attacks in France: the defrost system of the refrigeration units is started remotely, causing them to heat up, t-online writes.
Rewe and Edeka are so far playing it down. An Edeka spokesperson said in response to an enquiry that so far these were “a few isolated cases”. However, owing to the cooperative structure with independent retailers, the Edeka head office said it had no further information so far, Handelsblatt reports. How many supermarkets in Germany are actually affected is not known; the perpetrators’ motives also remain in the dark. No one has so far claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Brussels sees an attack on the food chain
The attacks are part of a series across Europe. According to tagesschau.de, refrigeration units in supermarkets in Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, Luxembourg, Estonia, Finland and the Netherlands have also been manipulated in recent days. Euronews, citing AFP, additionally names Italy and Portugal. As early as 12 October, cooling systems in hundreds of branches of the Intermarché and Coopérative U chains in France had been paralysed, and all chilled and frozen goods had to be destroyed; at the time, damage running into the millions was reported. In some branches the freezer shelves remain empty to this day, Euronews reports.
EU Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen described the incidents as a “deliberate attempt to disrupt our food chain and undermine consumer confidence in it”. The repeated occurrence of these cyberattacks was “deeply worrying”. The attacks were being taken “very seriously”, Hansen said; nevertheless, food safety in Europe was not currently at risk. According to t-online and Euronews, he spoke on Monday.
For the affected retailers, however, it is about the survival of their branch: in Lilienthal, according to owner Breiding, the insurer is currently examining whether it will cover the damage. In Reisbach, the operators’ anger is directed above all at the consequences for the food: “We work every day to avoid food waste,” the Facebook post says. “And then people come up with the idea of deliberately destroying such quantities of food?!”
Editor’s note: The available reports do not allow conclusions to be drawn about the total damage in Germany or whether further stores are affected. Whether the police investigations in Wuppertal, Oldenburg and Landshut will be merged is not yet known.
