Hackers Hijack French Blood Service Freezers, Set to 110°C

Caught in time

The worst was avoided. The EFS said an on-call technician noticed a temperature rise in the cold rooms overnight and acted before the samples were damaged by heat. The Health Ministry said there were "zero operational consequences" because the situation was spotted in time. Neither transfusions nor patients were affected.

The stakes were high: frozen plasma intended for transfusion was stored in the affected units. An EFS employee explained that such heat destroys antibodies, making the blood unusable for transfusion.

A familiar pattern

The method echoes the attack in mid-October, when hackers took over the fridges of hundreds of supermarkets across France, pushing temperatures up to 50°C and ruining large quantities of food. France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI said the attackers exploited "elementary security flaws".

The EFS incident happened the same night as a new wave of attacks on supermarket fridges in several European countries, including Belgium, Luxembourg and Sweden. For now, nothing indicates the attacks are connected, though the coincidence is striking.

Security specialists were not surprised. After the supermarket attack, several warned that healthcare could be next. Samuel Hassine, CEO of Filigran, noted that the same control boxes used in supermarkets are found in hospital pharmacies, laboratories and logistics warehouses. Pierre-Henry Poiret, a cybersecurity engineer at HarfangLab, said the risks extend well beyond retail.