France threatens tough action against Iran over cyberattacks on 700 supermarket sites

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. Employees fill boxes of perished goods outside an Intermarche supermarket in Paris the day after a cyberattack targeted refrigeration systems at French supermarket chains, causing food losses and fires at several stores.

(REUTERS)Foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot told FranceinfoTV that Iran's ambassador would be summoned and European-level sanctions would be sought. "I can also tell you that we rule nothing out and will take all measures -- including those we may not disclose publicly -- that we deem proportionate and necessary to deter any further attacks," he added.

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. Hundreds of French supermarkets were hit in the October 11 and 12 cyberattacks, which raised the temperatures in their refrigerators, forcing many to throw away entire inventories of perishable food.

Similar incidents have since been reported in other European countries. On November 2, stores in at least nine other European countries were hit by a suspected cyberattack on their freezer systems. 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.

The prosecutor's office has requested international arrest warrants be issued for two Shahid Kaveh officials. Beccuau described the entity as "an offensive cyber unit affiliated with the Electronic and Cyber Centre of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC-CEC)".

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".

The United States and Israel fought a war against Iran that began with the killing of supreme leader Ali Khamenei on February 28. European countries did not get involved in that conflict, but French officials have accused Iran of spreading misinformation related to the protests that have rocked France over the past month.

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.