Latest: The summoning of Iran’s ambassador announced on Monday took place on Tuesday morning, the French foreign ministry said, and Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said France would push for EU sanctions over what he called an attack of unprecedented scale and aggression, warning that Paris would take whatever measures it judged proportionate and necessary, including some it would not discuss publicly, to deter new attacks and punish those responsible. AFP reported that Iran’s foreign ministry rejected the accusations as baseless and hostile; Tehran’s fuller rebuttal, reported by Yonhap, follows below.
Latest: Iran’s foreign ministry rejected the French attribution on Tuesday, calling it groundless and biased in a statement reported by Yonhap News Agency, and protesting strongly. Tehran said the accusation was slander meant to divert attention from France’s Middle East policy and to please the United States and Israel, and that it hid weakness in running state affairs, remarking that a government that cannot even control refrigerator temperature was shifting responsibility outward with absurd accusations. The ministry warned that Iran would not hesitate to take necessary and appropriate measures to protect its national interests and security. The rebuttal is Iran’s position, stated by its foreign ministry; the French attribution, set out below, rests on the Paris prosecutor’s investigation, and neither side’s account of who carried out the attacks has been independently verified in the sources read.
The Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime division has opened a judicial investigation into the leader of Shahid Kaveh, the offensive cyber unit affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards’ electronic and cyber centre, his two deputies and any other individuals identified, and has requested international arrest warrants against the three men, CBS News and Al Jazeera reported. The investigation covers fraudulent interference with an automated data-processing system and causing damage by means dangerous to persons, both as part of an organized group and aggravated by serving a foreign power, Iran, plus participation in a criminal conspiracy to prepare a serious crime. The counts are under investigation; no suspect has been named publicly and there have been no convictions. Investigators said the attackers remotely started abnormal defrost cycles and disabled safety alerts through web interfaces, raising temperatures to 50C overnight across about 700 stores and starting roughly 20 fires.
France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, told a press briefing at the G7 summit in Paris on Monday that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was responsible for the cyberattacks of October 11 and 12, in which hackers remotely overrode thermostat settings on freezers and chiller cabinets in as many as 700 supermarkets and shops across France, driving temperatures from as low as minus 27C to above 50C in some cases. Thousands of tons of food had to be dumped, and in some stores the heat sparked fires and water damage. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said investigators had identified the working methods of Shahid Kaveh, a cyber unit linked to the Guards, and had opened an investigation into its leadership.
Barrot called the attack an act of unprecedented scale and aggression, said the Iranian ambassador had been summoned to protest, and said Europe-wide sanctions would be imposed on those responsible. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the bloc’s foreign ministers would take up the incidents at their council next Monday. No Iranian response had been reported at that point; Tehran’s rebuttal followed on Tuesday, in the Latest update above.