France's foreign minister said on Tuesday that Paris rules out "nothing" to respond to the October cyberattack that disabled hundreds of supermarket freezers, attributing the operation to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Jean-Noël Barrot told FranceinfoTV that Iran's ambassador would be summoned to the foreign ministry and that France would push for European Union sanctions against those responsible. "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," Barrot said.
The remarks came a day after Barrot, speaking at a G7 foreign ministers meeting in Paris, formally accused the IRGC of orchestrating the sabotage. He called the attack "unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression" and said it was the first large-scale cyber sabotage campaign on French soil.
Hackers targeted 700 sites in France on October 11 and 12, raising refrigerator temperatures to as high as 50 degrees Celsius. The attack forced retailers including Intermarché, Cooperative U, Carrefour, Monoprix and E.Leclerc to discard tonnes of spoiled food, according to Al-Monitor. The intruders compromised remote-management software made by Danish engineering firm Danfoss.
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau opened a criminal investigation on Monday into Shahid Kaveh, a hacking unit linked to the IRGC's cyber centre, and requested international arrest warrants for two of its officials. A second wave of attacks hit more than 100 stores in nine other European countries on November 2.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Paris for the G7 talks, said the accusation did not surprise him. "They have done things like this for a very long time," Rubio said of Iran, describing the IRGC as a "deranged group of revolutionaries".
Tehran has not officially commented. Some Iranian outlets called the charge baseless, according to BBC News. France 24 reported that the government has not published the evidence behind its attribution.