France lashed out at Iran Tuesday when its foreign minister said Paris rules out "nothing" in response to an October cyberattack on hundreds of supermarket refrigerators that it blames on Tehran.
France summoned Iran's ambassador and sought European sanctions, Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said, adding that the country would "rule nothing out and take all measures – including those it might not disclose publicly – that it deemed proportionate and necessary to deter further attacks."
The goal, Barrot told Franceinfo TV, is "to deter anyone tempted, in Iran or elsewhere, to repeat the attacks."
Barrot announced Monday that France held Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responsible for cyberattacks targeting supermarkets, the first large-scale cyber sabotage in France.
"This attack is unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression," Barrot said on the sidelines of a G-7 foreign ministers' meeting in Paris.
The secretary-general of the French Foreign Ministry received Iran's ambassador Tuesday, the ministry said.
Hundreds of French supermarkets were hit Oct. 11-12 by cyberattacks that raised refrigerator temperatures, forcing many to discard entire inventories of perishable food.
Similar incidents have since been reported in other European countries.
Nov. 2, a suspected cyberattack hit stores in at least nine other European countries, targeting their freezer systems.
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said Monday she opened an investigation into Shahid Kaveh, a shadowy cyber unit of the IRGC, Iran's ideological army, in connection with the attacks.
The prosecutor's office requested international arrest warrants for two Shahid Kaveh officials.
Beccuau described the entity as "an offensive cyber unit affiliated with the Electronic and Cyber Center of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC-CEC)."
France's Center for Coordination of Cyber Crises, which includes security and intelligence agencies, said the unit "conducts large-scale campaigns targeting industrial equipment for the purpose of sabotage, directed primarily against Israel and the United States, but also against France and other European countries."
French officials have accused Iran of spreading misinformation related to protests that rocked France over the past month.
The cyberattacks in France targeted 700 sites. The attackers took over cooling systems using web interfaces to "initiate abnormal, indefinite defrost cycles" and disable alerts from sensors designed to activate when temperatures exceeded a certain threshold, Beccuau said.
