France accuses Iran of sabotaging 700 supermarkets
Paris blames a Revolutionary Guard unit for October's attack on store refrigeration, which caused fires and tens of millions of euros in losses.
France on Monday formally accused Iran of sabotaging the refrigeration systems of more than 700 supermarkets across the country on the night of Oct. 11 to 12. The foreign ministry's statement traces the attack to Shahid Kaveh, a unit of the cyber command of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the regime's elite military force.
The strike caused extensive physical damage, fires and spoiled food worth "several tens of millions of euros," Paris says. There is no public breakdown of that figure. The statement calls the attack "unprecedented in its scale and level of aggression" and the first purely sabotage-driven cyber campaign on French soil.
This was not a data theft or a ransom job, the usual aim of such attacks. The stated goal was to destroy stock and damage equipment: without cold storage, a grocery chain's food spoils within hours.
The statement ties the case to earlier campaigns attributed to the same Revolutionary Guard, including the 2023 destabilization effort against the magazine Charlie Hebdo and one aimed at organizers of the 2024 Paris Olympics. It also notes that the European Union sanctioned an entity called Emennet Pasargad in March. France's cyber crisis coordination center published a joint report on those actors' offensive operations at the same time.
France will summon Iran's ambassador and ask its European Union partners for more sanctions on Iranian entities and individuals. Paris also reserves "any additional measure, public and non-public."
For readers in Mexico, the case is a practical warning: internet-connected refrigeration controllers, common at any supermarket chain, can become targets in an attack on the infrastructure that keeps food supply running.
The sanctions proposal now goes to the other EU member states.
