--- title: 8 Steps To Keep Your Smart Home Safe from Cyber Attacks description: Hackers pushed freezers to 50C in supermarkets across seven European countries. Here is what happened and how to secure the smart devices in your home. author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-03T10:40:24.202Z updated: 2026-11-03T10:42:59.171Z canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/smart-home-cyber-attack-protection-steps image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/unsplash-ijksskfeqrm.webp categories: Home & Living content_type: Guide publication: Rich Woman Magazine schema_type: Article --- In the early hours of Monday 2nd November, freezers in dozens of supermarkets across seven European countries began to warm up. By morning, staff in Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland were throwing stock away. At an ICA store in Stockholm, the sales manager said every freezer had reached 50C after the attack began at around 2am. A single Delhaize branch in Hoeilaart, Belgium, put its losses at €100,000. This is the second wave in a month. In October, the same method ruined food in around 700 French supermarkets. Nobody has claimed either attack, and the technique behind both is simple enough to concern anyone with smart devices at home. ## Supermarkets Hit in Seven Countries [Belgium took the heaviest blow](https://richwoman.co/article/supermarket-cyberattack-freezers-sweden-belgium-ireland). Around 40 Delhaize supermarkets in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected, according to the BBC, and Belgian media also reported affected Carrefour, Intermarché and Spar stores. Colruyt Group, which runs Spar in Belgium through franchises, confirmed that five shops had been attacked. Ikea said its store in Mons was hit. In the Netherlands, Danfoss said the cooling systems of at least 17 businesses had been attacked, including butchers and small neighbourhood shops. A Selver supermarket in Estonia also reported problems. Belgium's federal prosecutor has opened an investigation, and Delhaize suspended its ordering systems in Luxembourg as a precaution. A spokesperson for the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium told Reuters that the people responsible are unknown and may never be identified. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said no incidents had been reported in Britain and that it was working with international partners. ## How a Defrost Setting Became a Weapon Stephan Moelans, chief executive of Sabcobel, the Belgian firm that runs Delhaize's refrigeration, said the units' evaporators had been switched into defrost mode. Every supermarket freezer defrosts for a short period overnight, and its temperature rises slightly while it does. The attackers kept that normal setting running for hours. No malicious software was needed. The attackers used a function the equipment was built to perform. Moelans said the affected units need physical changes, not just a software update, and that Sabcobel was disconnecting them. 'The simplest solution is to manage the fridges over a secure internet connection,' he told the BBC, adding that most of his customers had made that switch after the French attack. ## The French Supermarket Cyber Attack in October On the night of 11th to 12th October, hackers took over refrigeration controllers in French stores run by E.Leclerc, Intermarché, Carrefour, Monoprix and Coopérative U. Temperatures in some fridges and freezers reached 50C, and the Paris prosecutor reported fires at some stores. Le Monde reported that the attackers stretched the defrost cycle from one hour to eight, long enough to ruin stock without setting off the usual alarms. France's finance minister, Roland Lescure, told parliament that about 700 of the country's 10,000 supermarkets were affected. Intermarché's chief executive, Thierry Cotillard, put the cost at tens of millions of euros in a single day. France's cybersecurity agency identified compromised controllers made by Danfoss, Copeland and its Dixell brand. Danfoss said most affected systems were older products that no longer received software or security updates, and that it had long advised customers to update their firmware and keep systems behind a firewall. Researchers at the security firm Claroty had published flaws in the Danfoss AK-SM 800A and Copeland XWEB Pro controllers in August, two months before the attack, although investigators have not confirmed that those flaws were used. ## Why Supermarket Freezers Are Connected to the Internet A supermarket's chilled aisles usually run from one control panel that manages every fridge and freezer in the store. Retailers connect that panel to the internet so maintenance engineers can check temperatures and adjust settings from anywhere, without sending someone out in the middle of the night. [That convenience leaves a door open](https://richwoman.co/article/water-utilities-cyber-attacks-seven-states-fbi-epa). The day after the French attack, Reuters used the scanning service Shodan to find at least 4,500 Danfoss control interfaces visible online. On 22nd October, the security firm Forescout published a wider scan that found 12,976 exposed refrigeration control services on 6,017 internet addresses in 99 countries. Forescout found that 80% of the Danfoss StoreView systems it observed ran older firmware potentially affected by known flaws, and warned that stolen or shared contractor logins add further risk. 'This is about basic cyber hygiene,' Ken Munro of the British security firm Pen Test Partners told Reuters. ## Is the UK Exposed? No British store has reported an attack. Analysis by UK Cyber Defence, shared with the trade title The Grocer, found more than 800 UK retailer fridge control systems open to anyone online with the right search tools. British food retail has already paid heavily for cyber attacks. Marks & Spencer said its April 2025 ransomware attack cost about £300 million, and the same spring brought attacks on the Co-op and on Peter Green Chilled, a Somerset distributor that supplies most of the major UK supermarkets. ## Your Smart Home Has the Same Weak Spots The supermarket attacks combined three failures: equipment reachable from the open internet, old software that no longer received security fixes and weak or shared logins. Your home can have all three. UK government figures put the average household at nine smart devices, from televisions and speakers to doorbells, cameras, thermostats and fridges. When the consumer group Which? filled a test home with smart devices, it recorded more than 12,000 hacking attempts from around the world in a single week. A hacked supermarket freezer costs a retailer a lorry-load of stock. A hacked camera, doorbell or router can expose [your family's privacy](https://richwoman.co/article/your-family-cyber-policy-protect-your-child-from-identity-theft), your passwords and your bank logins. The fixes below take an afternoon. ## How to Protect Your Smart Home From Cyber Attacks ### Change Every Default Password Start with your broadband router, then every device and the app that controls it. Give each one its own password built from three random words, as the NCSC recommends, and keep them in a password manager. Since 29th April 2024, UK law has banned manufacturers from selling smart devices with universal default passwords such as 'admin', but older devices in your home may still carry one. ### Switch On Automatic Updates Updates close the gaps attackers use. Turn on automatic updates in each device's app or settings, and check your router's admin page for firmware updates too. ### Check How Long a Device Will Be Supported Before You Buy Most of the French freezers ran on products that no longer received security updates. The same UK law requires manufacturers to state the minimum period for which a device will receive security updates. Look for that date before you buy, and plan to replace any device that has passed it. ### Turn Off Remote Access You Do Not Use If you never check your camera, heating or fridge from outside the house, switch off remote viewing or remote control in its app. Check your router for a setting usually called UPnP, which lets devices open themselves to the internet automatically, and turn it off unless something you rely on needs it. ### Put Smart Devices on a Separate Network Most routers let you create a guest network. Connect your smart gadgets to it and keep your laptop, phone and work devices on the main network, so a compromised doorbell cannot reach the computer that holds your files. ### Protect the Accounts That Control Your Home Your smart home is only as secure as the app account that runs it. Turn on two-step verification wherever the app offers it, and never share your own login with installers or tradespeople. Give them separate access and remove it when the job is done, the same lesson Forescout drew for supermarket contractors. ### Keep a Check That Does Not Need the Internet A connected fridge reports its temperature through software that someone can tamper with. A cheap fridge thermometer has no such weakness. The Food Standards Agency advises keeping your fridge at 5C or below and your freezer at minus 18C. ### Reset Any Device You Think Has Been Taken Over If a device changes settings by itself, behaves strangely or shows logins you do not recognise, follow the manufacturer's instructions to reset it, then set a new password and install updates before you reconnect it. France's cybersecurity agency warned that resetting an unsupported device is not enough if it stays exposed online, so replace anything that no longer receives updates. Reset every device before you sell or recycle it too. The supermarket chains learned this lesson with skips full of spoiled food. You can apply it at home this weekend with your router login, a fresh set of passwords and an hour of updates.