The largest supermarket in the Netherlands, Albert Heijn, was hit by a cybersecurity attack on Sunday afternoon. I first noticed in the evening when I couldn’t enter items into the shopping list, even manually. Well, I could with a bit of patience – you can type two or three letters before you get an error screen, so I kept typing a few characters and then swiping away from the error.
The attack has some noticeable effects:
- No food deliveries
- The website is down (as of 14 October)
- The app is down
- There is less stock in the stores, especially fresh products like fruits and vegetables
The above photo shows the empty fruit and vegetable shelves on Monday, although please note this is a photo of only that area – there is still a decent amount of meat, fish and shelf stable products. This is by no means a corona situation, especially since it only affects Albert Heijn and not other supermarkets like Jumbo or Dirk. (Here’s a flashback to the Dutch sign language interpreter and her sign for “niet hamsteren”/”don’t hoard” at a corona press conference in March 2020. Click the Instagram post.)
The latest update as of Wednesday evening was that Albert Heijn has restarted some systems and would begin sending out deliveries again to stores, although in some areas of the Netherlands it could take up to a week to see full shelves again. The app and website are still down, though.
Interestingly for my American readers, several American supermarkets which are daughter companies under Albert Heijn’s parent company (Ahold Delhaize) are also having website and app issues as well, including Food Lion, Stop & Shop and Hannaford. Ahold Delhaize reported that the cyberattacks were coming from multiple countries, including the US and more specifically from servers from one of those three companies. It is possible one of those companies was hacked first and then the hackers used that to try and gain access to Albert Heijn’s servers.
Albert Heijn and sister chains abroad hit by likely cyberattack from dutchnews.nl
And while it is likely unrelated, around the same time some French supermarkets were also hacked. More specifically, their cooling units and freezers were set to 50 degrees Celsius, or 122 degrees Fahrenheit, in the middle of the night. Which meant a lot of food spoiled. Some units also caught on fire. (Geez…)
Hackers force French supermarket fridges to heat up to 50C in ‘unprecedented cyber-attack from theguardian.com
