France just threatened Iran with secret retaliation over a cyberattack
2 days ago · 10 November 2026Share
Jean-Noël Barrot, French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, speaks during the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. File photo. Dati Bendo / European Union, 2025 / EC - Audiovisual Service · CC BY 4.0
France just said it's ruling out nothing.
Jean-Noël Barrot, France's foreign minister, said it today, on the sidelines of a G7 meeting in Paris.
He's talking about a cyberattack on French supermarket fridges last month. And France blames Iran.
So what did Barrot actually say? That France will take every measure it thinks it needs. His words: rule nothing out and take all measures, including ones it might not disclose publicly, that it deems proportionate and necessary to deter further attacks.
Measures it won't even tell us about.
France has already summoned Iran's ambassador. Now it's pushing for sanctions on Iran at the European level too.
So what actually happened in October?
On the 11th and 12th, hackers broke into the cooling systems at around 700 commercial sites across France. Mostly supermarkets. But also butcher shops, a slaughterhouse, food-processing factories.
They forced the fridges into abnormal, nonstop defrost cycles. And they switched off the sensors that were supposed to warn staff the temperature was climbing.
E.Leclerc, Intermarché, Carrefour, Monoprix, Coopérative U. All hit.
Millions of euros of food, ruined. In some stores the heat even started fires or melted equipment. One supermarket owner thinks the total cost nationwide could run into the tens of millions of euros.
And here's the escalation. A day ago, the Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, opened a formal investigation into a group called Shahid Kaveh. She calls it an offensive cyber unit linked to the Revolutionary Guard's Electronic and Cyber Centre.
Her office has now asked other countries to arrest two Shahid Kaveh officials.
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The Berlaymont Building in Brussels houses the headquarters of the European Commission. File photo. Ank Kumar · CC BY-SA 4.0
France's own Centre for Coordination of Cyber Crises says this unit runs large campaigns against industrial equipment. Mainly aimed at Israel and the United States. But also France and other European countries.
So that's France treating this as a crime. France's new line treats it as something a state did.
Barrot went further than his own prosecutor. He said he could confirm Iran's Revolutionary Guard carried out the attack. Today he called it unprecedented in both its scale and its aggression.
Now here's a detail that matters. The hackers didn't act under their own name. Reuters reports they worked through front groups posing as independent hacktivists, with names like CyberAveng3rs and Cyber Isnaad Front.
And Microsoft had privately linked Iran to all this at least two weeks before France said so out loud.
This didn't stop in October either. On 2 November, a suspected cyberattack hit freezer systems in stores across at least nine other European countries. Then this month, a second wave hit more than 100 sites across Europe, including French blood banks. Staff had to move blood supplies to other cold storage to stop it spoiling.
Nobody has taken responsibility for the November attacks. And it hasn't been independently confirmed they're even linked to the French one.
There's a similar case in America too. In August, refrigerators at half a dozen US military stores stopped working. The Pentagon is treating it as a suspected cyberattack and is working with French investigators. But no link to the French attack has been established.
Jody Westby runs the cybersecurity firm Global Cyber Risk. She says tracing who's really behind an attack like this is very difficult. Partly because international cooperation on cybercrime is weak. Partly because of how internet traffic itself gets routed.
Iran hasn't responded. Not to the arrest warrant request, not to Barrot's threat of undisclosed measures. Nothing public at all.
So what does France actually have in mind? Still unclear. Barrot won't say what the undisclosed measures are. Nobody knows if that means France running its own cyber operation back.
And it's not clear how far the push for European sanctions will get either, since any European Union sanctions need every member state on board.
For now, France has accused a state of attacking its supermarkets. And it's told the world, in public, that it has options it isn't going to describe.
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