France’s foreign minister said Tuesday that Paris ruled out “nothing” to respond to a major cyberattack on hundreds of supermarket fridges in October that it has blamed on Iran.
Foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot told FranceinfoTV that Iran’s ambassador would be summoned and European-level sanctions would be sought. The goal, Barrot said, is “to deter anyone who might be tempted, in Iran or elsewhere, to do it again”. Barrot said Monday that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was behind cyberattacks on supermarkets in the first such large-scale cyber sabotage on French territory. “This attack is unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression,” Barrot said on the sidelines of a G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Paris. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said Monday she had opened an investigation into Shahid Kaveh, a shadowy cyber unit of the IRGC, the Islamic republic’s ideological army, over the attacks. France’s Centre for Coordination of Cyber Crises, which groups security agencies including the intelligence services, said the unit “conducts large-scale campaigns targeting industrial equipment for the purpose of sabotage, directed primarily against Israel and the United States, but also against France and other European countries”. In the cyberattacks in France, which targeted 700 sites, the attackers took over cooling systems using web interfaces to “initiate abnormal, indefinite defrost cycles” and disable alerts from sensors designed to go off when temperatures exceeded a certain threshold, Beccuau said.
