Paris Blames Tehran for Rotting Food, Sells Sanctions

Seven hundred sites. That's how many French supermarkets Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot says were hit when attackers raised the temperatures in refrigerators on October 11 and 12, forcing some stores to throw away entire inventories of perishable food. On Monday, on the sidelines of the G7 foreign ministers' meeting in Paris, Barrot named his culprit: Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. "This attack is unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression," he said, promising "sanctions at the European level against all those responsible."

The summoned ambassador, the sanctions, the "necessary and proportionate measures -- whether public or otherwise." The script is familiar. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas added that "our response should be strong." Nobody in the room mentioned the people who actually carted the rot out of the stores.

Who Got Crushed

In the hours after the hack, supermarket employees hauled boxes of perished meat and melted ice cream into giant trash containers. Some refrigerators had the temperature turned up so high they caught fire. One French supermarket owner estimated the total costs could add up to tens of millions of euros nationwide. A second wave this month hit more than 100 establishments across Europe and even reached refrigerators used by French blood banks, forcing employees to move blood to other cold storage units.

The Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, described the mechanics: attackers took control of the equipment remotely via web interfaces "to initiate abnormal, indefinite defrost cycles," while the alert sensors designed to go off when temperatures climbed were "simultaneously disabled."

The Easy Target

Here's the detail that sits awkwardly beside the thunder from Paris. Cybersecurity experts told Reuters the October 11 attack appeared to have been easy to pull off. The firm behind many of the stricken units said several were obsolete or running outdated firmware, which could have made it easy for hackers to break in. Food retail's cold chain, it turns out, ran on equipment nobody bothered to update. Who decided that, and who profited from the savings, is a question the foreign minister didn't take at the G7 podium.

War Logic, Fridge Edition

The fridges are now a front in a larger conflict. The United States and Israel fought a war against Iran that began with the killing of supreme leader Ali Khamenei on February 28, in what key dates describe as the first year of the conflict. European countries did not get involved in that war. Yet here is France, calling a cyberattack "a major attack on the nation's interests and the security of the French people."

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Paris for the talks, offered his own diplomacy: the IRGC is a "deranged group of revolutionaries," and he asked "what kind of sickos are these people?" The Pentagon, meanwhile, is treating the August malfunctions in at least half a dozen military commissaries as a suspected cyberattack, and working with French officials. Reuters could not establish any link between the August incidents and the French campaign. A person familiar with the matter said the Pentagon considers Iran a suspect, but the investigation is ongoing.

The named men sit on both sides of the sanctions ledger. The US Treasury sanctioned Hamid Reza Lashgarian and Mahdi Lashgarian in 2024, two years ago, over cyberattacks. The new French investigation targets the head of Shahid Kaveh and his two deputies. If sanctions two years ago had stopped anything, there'd be no fridges to write about.

Meanwhile, Back on the Street

French officials have accused Iran of spreading misinformation related to the protests that have rocked France over the past month. The base facts offer no detail on what those protests are about or who is in them. What they show is the state reaching for a foreign hand to explain unrest at home, while false bomb alerts against dozens of flights, whose origin has yet to be made clear, disrupt European air traffic.

Iran's mission to the United Nations did not return messages seeking comment. Iran routinely denies carrying out malicious cyber operations. The Pentagon said it is "aware of speculation regarding a potential cyber incident" and could not say more for security reasons.

So the pattern holds: a brittle, cost-cut infrastructure fails, governments blame a rival state, and the answer is more sanctions, more summoning of ambassadors, more security. The workers dumping spoiled meat get nothing. The blood bank staff shuffling blood between freezers get nothing. The state gets a new enemy, and the next round of cuts goes unexamined.