France summoned Iran's ambassador to Paris on Tuesday after accusing Tehran of orchestrating a cyberattack that disrupted refrigeration systems in over 700 French supermarkets on October 11 and 12.
Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said the attack on supermarket fridges was "the first large-scale cyberattack aimed at sabotage on our national territory" and called it "a major attack on the nation's interests and the security of the French people." He said France would push for European Union sanctions and reserved the right to take undisclosed measures in response.
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau opened an investigation into Shahid Kaveh, a cyber unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and requested international arrest warrants for two officials from the unit. The IRGC remotely accessed refrigerators to trigger abnormal, indefinite defrost cycles, raising temperatures and forcing supermarkets to discard all perishable food. Millions of euros' worth of food spoiled. In some cases, raised temperatures sparked fires or melted equipment.
French supermarket groups E-Leclerc, Intermarche, Carrefour, Monoprix and Cooperative U were hit. Similar incidents occurred in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Luxembourg and Sweden on November 2.
Jody Westby, chief executive of Global Cyber Risk LLC, told Al Jazeera that tracking the group responsible is "very difficult" because of poor international cooperation on cybercrime investigations, which has been a problem for over 20 years.