Cyberattack on supermarkets, government takes stock at Palazzo Chigi

On November 3 the Italian government gathered the ministers concerned at Palazzo Chigi to take stock of the cyberattack that hit supermarket refrigeration systems in several European countries, according to CRI Italian. The episode, which according to reconstructions affected at least seven European countries, has not so far been formally attributed to a perpetrator.

From the meeting came an official assessment of the scale of the damage to the Italian system: “the impact of the attacks is at present strongly limited” — Italian government, official statement. The formula, released at the end of the meeting, for now confines the case to a monitored cybersecurity issue, with no significant disruptions reported in the national retail sector.

The affair comes at a time when the issue of the security of European digital infrastructure has returned to the center of debate. A broader reading of the episode comes from Il Foglio, which notes how the episode shows how exposed European Union member states, businesses and citizens are to today’s technological reality, made up of growing interconnections and objects connected to the network — the affected refrigeration systems fall into this category, being industrial equipment managed and monitored remotely via computer networks.

The fact that the attack simultaneously hit several countries, without it yet being clear who carried it out, poses two distinct sets of problems for the Italian government: the immediate management of any fallout on the food distribution cold chain, and the more structural discussion on the resilience of networks controlling critical infrastructure — a topic that, according to Il Foglio’s reading, concerns all twenty-seven member states and not Italy alone.

For now the official Italian position remains that of the Palazzo Chigi meeting: limited impact, situation under monitoring. No details have so far been made public on which sectors of national retail were affected or on any technical countermeasures adopted by the operators hit.