Key facts
- The NCSC said it was working with affected UK companies and that the national impact was minimal, per director of operations Paul Chichester.
- Trade body Aims told the BBC some of its more than 300 members were affected; it said the units were empty and no produce was lost.
- Aims said one company's cold units heated to up to 100C and two others reported their units had started to defrost.
- Lupovis recorded 256 attempted attacks from 91 different sources between October 20 and October 30 against dummy Danfoss fridge controls.
- Lupovis chief executive Xavier Bellekens said the probing infrastructure overlapped with infrastructure previously associated with Russian-linked operations.
- NCSC chief executive Richard Horne described the fridge attacks as the foothills of an enlarged cyberthreat.
UK meat processing companies were hit by cyber-attacks that raised the temperatures of refrigeration units, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre said on November 3, 2026, adding that the national impact was minimal.
Speaking at the launch of the NCSC annual review on Tuesday, the centre's director of operations, Paul Chichester, said: "We're aware of those incidents in the UK, and obviously we're working with the affected organisations. We'll keep monitoring that." He added: "At the moment, the impact is minimal." Chichester said the NCSC, part of the GCHQ spy agency, was working with organisations to identify similar loopholes and close them before hackers exploit them. He said the agency could not comment on who might have carried out the attacks, but that they were not AI-enabled and used vulnerabilities that had been "out there for a long period of time".
The British Association of Independent Meat Suppliers told the BBC some of its more than 300 members had been affected, with one company's cold units heating to up to 100C and another two reporting their units had started to defrost. Aims said the affected units were empty at the time and no produce was lost. No UK grocery chain has been directly affected so far.
The incidents follow attacks on refrigeration systems at retailers in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden, which reported problems on Monday, with some temperatures rising to as high as 50C, and several companies confirming they had been hacked. Similar incidents occurred in France the previous month, where the cyber-attack involved legacy technology connected to the internet with default passwords.
Cybersecurity researchers said attacks on dummy Danfoss fridge controls, which were targeted by hackers in mainland Europe, were similar to recent operations linked to Russia. Xavier Bellekens, chief executive of the cyberdefence firm Lupovis, said it had recorded 256 attempted attacks from 91 different sources between October 20 and October 30 after setting up online honeypot traps indistinguishable to attackers from real Danfoss fridge controllers. Most authentication attempts used the manufacturer's publicly documented factory-default username and password credentials, and the attackers used what Bellekens called bulletproof hosting.