Hackers raised temperatures at three French blood cold stores, national blood service says

France's national blood service, EFS, said hackers accessed control systems and raised temperatures at three cold stores used for blood products. The Guardian reported the service's account, which places the attack overnight on Monday, 2 November.

EFS said temperature and defrosting thresholds, the settings that govern how warm the storage units can get and when they defrost, were raised to "very high levels." The service said its alarm systems allowed technicians to intervene before the blood products were compromised. EFS also said no sample or blood product was altered as a result of the incident, that no health impact had been identified, and that no loss of blood products is to be reported.

Affected equipment was either brought under control or neutralised, according to EFS, and stored products were transferred preventively to other installations. The products in the affected equipment were plasma bags for transfusion and plasma bags for fractionation, the process of separating plasma into components used to make medicines. EFS said both were transferred or secured.

The service matters to a wide group of patients. EFS distributes blood, plasma and platelets to more than 1,900 hospitals in France and supports more than one million patients a year. Its cold rooms hold blood products at its preparation and distribution sites before delivery to health facilities, along with samples for its biobanks, which are stored collections of biological samples.

In a statement issued from Saint-Denis on 3 November, EFS said it was not directly targeted. The cybersecurity incident hit one of its refrigeration equipment providers, and altered the operating parameters of cold rooms that use that provider's solution. EFS said its technical teams were mobilised in coordination with ANSSI, France's national cybersecurity agency, and the Ministry of Health, and that monitoring of operations and temperatures across all of its equipment had been reinforced.

The incident comes amid wider reports of attacks on cold storage in France. Reuters has reported that hackers raised the temperature of refrigerators and freezers at French supermarkets to as high as 50 degrees Celsius. The Guardian has reported that hackers seized control of cooling units in as many as 700 supermarkets in France, and that shop fridges and freezers across Europe were hit by a second suspected cyber-attack.