It's been a bad time for French food. The country has endured a summer of record temperatures, with crops suffering under successive heatwaves and farmers left up to €10bn ($11.2bn) out of pocket. 

And now the country has suffered further losses to its food production. On Sunday night, a "large scale attack" was made against a Danish systems management company Danfoss, impacting software that controls refrigeration units across France. 

Major French supermarket chains said they were hit by the cyberattack that caused their refrigerators to automatically shoot up in temperature in hundreds of stores, forcing spoiled food to be thrown away and raising concerns about food security.

BFM TV said hackers "managed to remotely trigger the forced defrosting of the refrigeration systems in numerous stores."

The temperature of refrigerators and freezers spiked by up to 50 degrees celsius, sparking fires and destroying what could be tens of millions of dollars of perishable goods. Industry-giant Carrefour reported that 80 of their 6,000 supermarkets were affected, with any stored food now contaminated and unusable.

While the incident against French supermarkets is unprecedented, it constitutes the latest in a worrying trend of cyberattacks that the world is now grappling with.

The age of cyberattacks

Cyber attacks are deliberate attempts to breach computer systems, devices or digital data. 

While such attacks have long gone hand-in-hand with evolving technologies and a software-driven landscape, companies across the world are facing a surge in threats, moving cyber resilience from an IT issue to a preoccupation of boards and senior management.  

Last year, a UK survey showed that almost a third of bosses have reported rising cyber-attacks on supply chains. In the months since, the problems have escalated. American telecommunications company Verizon reported that the exploitation of vulnerable entry points in systems is up by 55 per cent from last year, and that breaches with third-party involvement now account for almost half of all breaches. 

Now businesses are being warned to prepare for AI-accelerated attacks. The figures are stark. Tech-powerhouse IBM estimates a 44 per cent year-over-year increase in the exploitation of public facing software or system applications, alongside a 49 per cent increase in attacks by ransomware groups. 

The company also reported that 300,000 AI chatbot credentials were observed for sale on the dark web, raising concerns of highly sensitive corporate secrets, intellectual property, and personal data being leaked.

Industry experts have emphasised that AI is rapidly reshaping the cyber landscape, with threats now coming from increasingly sophisticated malware that bypass traditional defense filters. As AI can continuously scan for network weaknesses and alter attack code in real time, the window between a vulnerability being discovered and exploited has dramatically reduced from 2.3 years in 2018 down to roughly 20 hours. 

Attackers can now run campaigns at a scale and speed that human-led teams struggle to match, and AI models have autonomously surfaced decades-old bugs, including a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD, a security-focused operating system, that evaded human review. 

The Cold Chain

While the specific attack seen in France is unchartered territory for the country, it's not the first time supermarkets have been targeted. UK chains Marks & Spencer and the Co-op were hit by "malicious" cyberattacks in 2025, where halted orders, shelf shortages and food waste ended up costing a combined half a billion pounds ($500m).

Importantly, it's not just the supermarkets themselves being affected. Companies that supermarkets rely on are also being besieged, impacting the 'cold chain', a temperature-controlled supply chain that keeps perishable items including fresh food within a strict, low-temperature range. 

According to data from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, 526 million tonnes of food, around 12 per cent of the global total, are lost or wasted due to insufficient refrigeration along the cold chain. 

In the Netherlands, retailer ​Ahold Delhaize, which manages temperature-controlled logistics, refrigerated distribution centers, and retail store refrigeration networks, announced on Monday a "security issue" on its network, taking several systems offline as a precaution.

Customers of the ⁠Netherlands' largest supermarket chain Albert Heijn received alerts via the retailer's smartphone app that the company was unable to deliver groceries because of a "cybersecurity incident". It's believed to be unrelated to the incicent in France.

In May last year, Peter Green Chilled, a distributor to major British supermarkets, said it was being held to ransom by hackers who had encrypted the company's data and locked them out of their systems.

The 'cold chain' is vital to global economies and societies, with stakeholders across multiple countries and regions. Significantly, it's not just food that is carried through operators: medicines, vaccines and chemicals are all transported via temperature-controlled containers, ensuring safety and regulation from point-of-production to the end consumer. 

Some estimates value the current global cold chain industry at a whopping $400bn. Nevertheless, as the industry continues to grow due to consumer demands, medical advancements, and supply chain modernization, long-term forecasts predict the market could reach $1.6 trillion in the next decade, making it an attractive target for would-be attackers.

Moreover, modern cold storage and transport fleets rely heavily on automated supervisory control and cloud-based systems, increasing digital entry points and associated risks. Perishable goods and pharmaceuticals also carry their own pressures, spoiling rapidly as soon as temperature regulation is affected. Hackers know this, and can leverage these strict timeframes to their advantage, demanding high ransoms for quick solutions.  

Fighting back

Security leaders are now being urged to adopt AI-driven monitoring and automated response tools, while tightening the basics: multi-factor authentication, rigorous patching and tighter oversight of suppliers.

Worryingly, however, attacks are increasingly coming from in-house. The recent spate of hackings from AI-giant OpenAI, made not by human workers, but their own autonomous AI agents, further illustrates that the risk is no longer confined to malicious outsiders. 

AI safety experts are increasingly pushing for a fundamental shift in how organisations think about security in an age of AI, to protect against not just actors using such technologies, but the autonomous nature of such technologies themselves. 

The UK government, widely hailed as a European leader in AI safety, announced that it would be launching an “agentic AI incident response capability” in response to such attacks, an approach described as akin to establishing AI first responders for cyberattacks.

As for France, prime minister Sébastien Lecornu has told media that he is “personally monitoring the situation,” and has asked the country’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI to look into the matter. As of yet, no group or country has been identified as being behind the attacks.