France’s national blood service said hackers accessed control systems overnight on Monday and raised temperatures and defrosting thresholds to “very high levels” at three cold stores holding vital blood products for over a million patients.
No group has claimed responsibility and no motive has been established.
The Établissement Français du Sang (EFS), which collects, tests, prepares and distributes blood, plasma and platelets to more than 1,900 hospitals and supports over a million patients a year, confirmed the incident. It comes amid a wider wave of cyber-attacks on commercial refrigeration systems across Europe that have driven temperatures as high as 50C (122F) and caused millions of euros in food spoilage.
Retailers in Italy, Germany, Romania and the UK were also hit recently, following disruptions the previous day in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden. Last month, similar attacks affected cooling units in as many as 700 French supermarkets. A regional branch of Crédit Mutuel bank also reported a cyber-attack last week.
A cyber security company Claroty hacked such systems in August 2026 to “warn” the industry that any external hacker could read those public advisories and scan the internet for facilities that failed to install their fix. Unpatched vulnerabilities in internet-connected software can allow remote takeover.
Claroty is an Israeli-founded industrial cybersecurity firm that published the refrigeration vulnerabilities exploited in the recent European cyberattacks.
France’s national blood service said hackers accessed control systems overnight on Monday and raised temperatures and defrosting thresholds to “very high levels” heating samples to 110°C from -30°C at three cold stores holding vital blood products. Alarm systems enabled technicians to intervene before most products were compromised.