Britain’s cyber security chiefs have issued an alert to retailers after European officials said the hacking of supermarket fridges was a threat to food security.
It is understood that no British supermarkets have been affected by the hacks but there are concerns that major chains, including Tesco and Sainsbury’s, rely on similar equipment.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of the GCHQ spy agency, said it was working with retailers to guard against the digital threat following attacks that caused widespread damage.
Industry sources said the NCSC had issued advice to retailers and was in touch with bosses to ensure that they were patching any vulnerabilities.
An NCSC spokesman told The Telegraph: “The NCSC is working with its international partners and industry to fully understand details of an incident.”
Richard Horne, the head of the NCSC, will warn companies on Tuesday that they need to “invest with urgency” and can no longer get away with doing “tech on the cheap”.
Horne will warn that AI is likely to be used to carry out a ransomware attack on Britain’s critical infrastructure in the next two years, and that organisations have spent years saving money instead of shoring up their cyber defences.
He is expected to link under-investment in cyber security to the attacks on fridges, saying: “For decades we have collectively got away with tech on the cheap.
“Our resulting exposure as a society is huge and increasingly exploited in cyber attacks, as we saw in the recent disruption of refrigeration units in supermarkets in France.”
A spokesman for the British Retail Consortium also confirmed that it had been liaising with domestic retailers about the incidents in Europe.
Graham Wynn, of the BRC, said: “Retailers invest heavily in their cyber security and are currently working with the National Cyber Security Centre to ensure their fridges and freezers are secure as possible against potential attacks.”
On Monday, it emerged that dozens of shops in Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, Luxembourg and Estonia had been targeted, just weeks after hundreds of grocery stores in France were hit. Ikea, the Swedish furniture chain, was among those affected.
The UK Government has urged households to stockpile enough essential supplies to survive for three days amid the growing threat from emergencies such as cyber attacks.
Wes Streeting, the Defence Secretary, said potential scenarios included power cuts or situations when “your local shop is subject to a cyber nattack”.
Tom Hegel, a researcher at SentinelOne, a cyber security firm, told Reuters that the absence of any financial demands probably pointed to sabotage, but that the attack would be difficult to trace.
He said: “An attacker who logs into an exposed control panel leaves almost nothing behind. A teenager and an intelligence service would look much the same from the defender’s side.”