KÖNIZ. A butcher in Köniz, on the edge of Bern, has closed its shop after a cyberattack on the controls for its fridges and freezers. Lüthi’s Fleischwaren said a targeted attack manipulated the electronic control of the cooling and freezing plant. The owner told SRF the freezer was at between 50 and 70 degrees. The meat was cooked. Price tags had melted. Staff could go into the room only wearing a mask.
The branch was taken off the network and shut, to rule out a risk to food safety. The firm is checking every process and every machine. It hopes to reopen the Köniz shop on 20 November, and only if the plant is reliably cold again. The business, a country butcher founded in Linden in 1931 and now in its fourth generation, also has shops in Oberdiessbach, Biel and Gerlafingen, and an online shop. The closure that has been announced is the Köniz branch.
The first public case of its kind in Switzerland
Keystone and SRF both describe it as the first attack of this kind to be made public in Switzerland. The same pattern has already hit shops abroad. Reports over recent weeks have named supermarkets in Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, Estonia and the Netherlands, with a cluster in France. On 2 November the French blood service confirmed that cooling units holding blood products had been reached and the temperature driven up. It said it was not itself the direct target. Swiss Transfusion SRC told the news agency that no attack on blood services in Switzerland is known. Regional services watch the threat and treat a temperature change in a blood store as something their licences already require them to control.
Volg has a Swiss retail case of its own, smaller and so far without a closure. The grocer told SRF that three branches found parameters on their refrigerated cabinets changed. It said it had taken measures, including a further tightening of technical precautions that were already in place. Volg did not describe spoiled food on the scale of the Köniz freezer. The point for other shops is that a cabinet with a network connection is now a door, not only a thermometer.
What the police have, and what they do not
Bern cantonal police were told the outline on Monday, a spokesman told Keystone. No criminal complaint had yet been filed when that was said. The police have opened an investigation and will contact the company. A closed shop and a cooked freezer are, on their own, a food-safety emergency. A prosecution needs a complaint, an offender and evidence that travels. Those are not the same clock as the 20 November reopening.
Households do not need the investigation to know what to do with food. Meat that has sat in a room at 50 degrees is not food. It does not become safe because the machine is cold again the next morning. The butcher’s decision to disconnect the plant and shut the branch is the consumer advice in operational form: if a shop says the cold chain broke, do not buy from the cabinet it has just switched back on until the shop says the stock is new. Bern has already had a cyberattack on a software supplier used by two pension funds. That case was about personal data. This one is about temperature. The common fact is that the weak point sat in a supplier’s box, or in a controller, rather than in the shop’s till.
Why a butcher is a target at all
Cooling plant is online because operators want to watch temperatures, defrost cycles and alarms from one screen, and because a central control can cut the electricity bill. That convenience is also the path an attacker uses. This article will not describe how any controller is reached, and it should not be read as a manual. The public fact is the effect: a setpoint changed, a room heated, a week of stock destroyed, a shop dark until 20 November.
Insurers, cantonal food inspectors and the federal cyber office will all have a version of the same question after Köniz. Who is allowed to change a temperature, from where, and who notices when the room starts to warm. Shops that can answer those three questions on paper, and test them, are the ones that do not have to answer them for the first time with a mask on. The meat at Lüthi’s cannot be uncooked. The next cabinet can still be kept cold.