French Blood Banks Hacked as Cyberattack Wave Hits Europe's Fridges

France's national blood service says hackers slipped into control systems at three cold-storage sites holding blood products and cranked temperature and defrosting thresholds to "very high levels." The EFS said its alarm systems did their job, letting technicians intervene before anything stored there was compromised. The intrusion happened overnight on Monday.

The EFS is not a corner shop. It is France's public blood transfusion operator, collecting, testing, preparing and distributing blood, plasma and platelets to more than 1,900 hospitals, supporting over a million patients a year. It said it was not directly targeted — the attack landed on cold stores run by its contractors. Plasma bags destined for transfusions and medicine manufacturing were shifted to other sites. France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI and the health ministry have been alerted, and monitoring of all EFS equipment has been beefed up.

The blood bank hack marks a sharp escalation of a strange, sprawling campaign. Supermarket refrigerators and freezers in nearly a dozen European countries have had their temperatures driven as high as 50C (122F), racking up millions of euros in food damage. Retailers in Italy, Germany, Romania and the UK were hit on Tuesday, following reports of refrigeration trouble in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden the day before. In France last month, hackers grabbed control of cooling units in as many as 700 supermarkets. A regional branch of Crédit Mutuel said on Wednesday it had been hit by a cyber-attack too.

The US may be dealing with the same playbook. In early August, a run of mysterious fridge malfunctions struck commissaries at no fewer than six military bases, and the Pentagon is investigating a suspected hack.

Europe is scrambling for a joint answer. Italy's government held emergency talks with intelligence officials on Tuesday, and EU spokesperson Thomas Regnier said bloc agencies are in urgent discussions with national authorities to shape a collective response. "These are not isolated incidents and of course we have to be collectively resilient and prepared for such cyber incidents," he said, declining to name any potential culprits. No motive is known and nobody has claimed responsibility.

Attribution remains wide open. Commercial refrigeration systems are increasingly monitored and controlled remotely, and software left unpatched stays open to intruders. Some authorities and experts fear government-sponsored hybrid attacks in the wake of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with Western intelligence officials saying Moscow is waging a sabotage campaign in Europe that takes many forms. Rafe Pilling, senior director for threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos, told the Guardian this week the most plausible scenarios are a "state-based signalling and demonstration of capability" or a lone-wolf hacker.