PARIS: France on Monday said Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were behind “unprecedented” cyberattacks on supermarket fridges in the country last month, vowing sanctions on a European level against Tehran.

Swathes of French supermarkets were hit in the Oct 11 and 12 cyberattacks, which raised the temperatures in their refrigerators, in some cases forcing them to throw away entire inventories of perishable food. “I can confirm that this attack was carried out by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said of the cyberattacks.

“This attack is unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression,” he said on the sidelines of the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in Paris. The Paris prosecutor said in a separate statement she had opened an investigation into Shahid Kaveh, a shadowy cyber unit of the IRGC, the Islamic republic’s ideological army, over the attacks.

“It marks the first large-scale cyberattack aimed at sabotage on our national territory, and it constitutes a major attack on the nation’s interests and the security of the French people,” said Barrot. “We will implement sanctions at the European level against all those responsible,” he added.

Barrot only directly referred to attacks against French supermarket systems, which he said targeted 700 sites. However, similar incidents have been reported in other European countries.

On Nov 2, grocery stores across at least nine other European countries were hit by a suspected cyberattack on their freezer systems. The incidents have shaken Europe at a time when officials have warned of the risk of cyberattacks from Russia as European countries press support of Ukraine in its war against Moscow.

Published in Dawn, November 10th, 2026