The Pentagon is investigating whether a foreign cyberattack is behind a wave of freezer failures that spoiled food at military commissaries across the United States, according to U.S. officials, in a case investigators now suspect is linked to a broader campaign of attacks on refrigeration systems stretching from Israel to France.

The outages hit at least nine Defense Commissary Agency stores, including Fort Huachuca in Arizona and Fort Irwin in California, according to reporting from Nextgov and NPR. At Fort Huachuca, a freezer "entered defrost mode and heated its contents," ruining the food inside. The U.S. Cyber Command, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the Army Criminal Investigation Division's Cyber Field Office are all involved in the probe, working alongside French law enforcement examining a strikingly similar incident overseas.

A pattern stretching across three continents

Investigators are looking at the U.S. commissary failures alongside an October attack that hit more than 350 French supermarkets — including Intermarché, Coopérative U and Carrefour locations — where hackers overrode refrigeration controls and forced stores to throw out spoiled food, according to NPR. Similar refrigeration attacks have since surfaced at stores in Sweden, Estonia, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium, and at an Israeli food plant earlier this year where hackers disabled safety alarms and destroyed industrial freezer compressors so badly that operations halted for more than a week.

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That warning comes from Josh Corman, a former CISA official, who said future attacks could just as easily target temperature-sensitive medicine or lab samples instead of groceries. Incident-response firm Profero says it has traced the Israeli attack to Iranian military-linked hackers it calls the Cyber Isnaad Front, based on forensic evidence and the group's own claims; a researcher who studies the group says it may have shared tools with Cyber Av3ngers, the group blamed for hacking U.S. water utilities in 2023. U.S. officials say some evidence points toward Iran in the commissary case as well, but only with "low confidence," and the Pentagon has publicly described the episode only as a "possible refrigeration disruption" without officially attributing it to hackers.

Security researchers at Forescout say thousands of refrigeration control systems worldwide remain exposed to the open internet even after the French incidents made headlines, many running decades-old Danfoss controllers that can no longer receive secure software updates. Danfoss has urged commercial customers to update firmware, take devices off the public internet and operate them behind a firewall — advice that, for now, appears to be outrunning how fast it's actually being followed.