A cyberattack targeting commercial refrigerators at a butcher shop in Kifissia, north of Athens, has brought to Greece a phenomenon that has raised concerns across Europe in previous days.
According to the shop owner, who spoke exclusively to SKAI's morning programme *Simera* on Tuesday, November 3, unidentified hackers gained access to the refrigeration system and attempted to alter its temperature settings, raising them from zero to as high as 150 degrees Celsius.
The incident was discovered in the early hours of the morning, when employees arrived at the shop to prepare wholesale orders. The business starts operating at around 4 a.m., and staff quickly noticed that something was wrong with the refrigerators.
Initially, they assumed it was a routine technical malfunction. They contacted the company's refrigeration technician to inspect the installations and identify the cause of the problem.
However, attempts to restore normal operation proved unsuccessful. The owner said the system was displaying temperatures that could not be explained by an ordinary malfunction. The staff also discovered that they could no longer access the system to change the settings manually.
"We were not allowed to get into the system," the owner said, describing their first attempts to identify the problem.
The technician initially investigated the possibility of an electricity supply or voltage problem, but found no indication of such an issue.
After approximately an hour of checks, the possibility that the system had been hacked was raised. According to the owner, the technician managed to regain control of the refrigerators after around two hours.
Temperature settings changed to 150°C, but major damage avoided
According to the shop owner, the attackers had altered the refrigerators' settings, attempting to increase the temperature from zero to 150 degrees Celsius.
The intervention was detected in time, and temperatures did not ultimately reach those levels. As a result, the business avoided the destruction of its meat stocks that could have followed a prolonged disruption of the refrigeration chain.
The shop has a modern monitoring system, with alerts sent both to the company responsible for maintaining the refrigeration equipment and to the managers' mobile phones. This means that unusual temperature fluctuations trigger warnings.
The problem, however, was that nobody initially suspected a cyberattack rather than a technical malfunction.
Similar incidents reported at two other businesses
The shop owner also said that his business may not have been the only one in the area to experience a similar incident.
According to his account, the technician informed him that problems had also occurred at two other businesses nearby: a supermarket and a food-service establishment.
The owner linked the incidents to the company responsible for maintaining the refrigeration systems, noting that the other two businesses were also clients of the same company.
This raises questions about whether the systems may have been accessed through shared technical infrastructure or remote-management accounts. However, there is currently no technical confirmation that the refrigeration company itself was the point of entry.
The owner said he did not believe his business had necessarily been singled out as a specific target, suggesting instead that the attackers were searching for vulnerable systems they could access.
Wi-Fi connection disabled to protect refrigerators
Following the incident, the business temporarily disabled the refrigerators' wireless connection in an effort to prevent further remote interference while appropriate security measures were being examined.
The owner explained that older refrigeration systems, which operate through conventional mechanisms, do not offer the same wireless management capabilities. Newer systems, by contrast, allow temperatures to be monitored and adjusted remotely, making day-to-day operations considerably easier but also creating new cybersecurity requirements.
Technical director tells SKAI: "Attacks have been reported in different parts of Greece"
The case took on wider dimensions following a second exclusive interview on SKAI's programme Atairiastoi, featuring both the owner of the Kifissia business and the technical director of the company that supports its refrigeration installations.
According to the technical director, the incident in Kifissia was not an isolated case. Similar attacks have been recorded in different parts of Greece, including the southern city of Kalamata, although not all cases have been made public.
He explained that attackers use specialised software to identify commercial refrigeration systems connected to the internet and equipped with remote-control capabilities.
By gaining access to the systems' digital controllers, they can alter operating settings and even activate defrosting heaters, causing temperatures inside refrigerators to rise dramatically.
The technical director specifically referred to internet access through port forwarding, a network configuration that allows external connections to communicate with devices within an internal network.
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