After the supermarkets, the fridge pirates are attacking French blood reserves, and it’s a real problem!

The wave of hacking of refrigeration installations which hit Europe on the night of November 1 to 2, 2026 also targeted freezers at the French Blood Establishment (EFS), reveals Le Canard chainé. Their temperature setpoint went from -30°C to 110°C, but an on-call technician was able to intervene in time.

According to the weekly, published on Wednesday November 4, the installations targeted are refrigerated containers used by the EFS, the public establishment responsible for blood collection in France, particularly in Burgundy-Franche-Comté. They are maintained by a service provider, the Coolworld company, and it was the company that was targeted by the attack, on the night of Sunday November 1st to Monday November 2nd. The hackers remotely changed the temperature setpoint of these containers, which is usually -30°C, to 110°C. Questioned by Le Canard chainé, the EFS acknowledged that frozen plasma intended for transfusions was one of the products stored in these containers. There is currently no indication that the computer systems of the EFS itself have been hacked.

The Ministry of Health assures that no consequences have been observed. An on-call technician spotted an abnormal rise in temperature and intervened before the products were damaged. “We could have lost samples or bags of plasma intended to treat patients,” Frédéric Pacoud, president of the EFS, admitted on BFMTV. Each year, 1.6 million blood donations provide treatment for around 500,000 patients in France. No claims or ransom demands have been reported, and no personal data of donors or patients has been leaked. It is not known how many containers were affected and how long their settings were changed.

This attack took place the same night as that which affected supermarket fridges and freezers in Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands and Estonia. In Belgium, Delhaize, Carrefour, Intermarché and the Ikea store in Mons had seen their freezers go into defrost mode, and the Danish manufacturer Danfoss had recognized that its systems were at fault. Three weeks earlier, on the night of October 11 to 12, hundreds of Intermarché, Coopérative U and E.Leclerc supermarkets had already seen their installations set to 50°C in France, and the Paris prosecutor's office had opened an investigation. “These are not extremely advanced attacks,” believes Benoît Grunenwald, cybersecurity expert at ESET. There is currently no indication that the Coolworld facilities also used Danfoss systems.

Machine-translated from French