Ahold Delhaize files police report over cyberattack as US sites stay offline

Ahold Delhaize has filed a formal police report with Dutch police over the cyberattack that forced it to take systems offline across Europe and the United States.

The report was filed on Monday, the company said in an update dated 19 October, after its investigation confirmed the suspicious activity detected in its IT infrastructure had “resulted from the malicious actions of others”. It had notified the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre within 24 hours of discovering the attack and was cooperating with law enforcement and regulators (Ahold Delhaize, Reuters).

Chief executive Frans Muller said the precautionary shutdown had affected “most of our brands across Europe and the United States”, though all stores stayed open throughout.

Albert Heijn, the Netherlands’ largest supermarket chain, said on Monday that online deliveries would not resume before Thursday at the earliest, extending the outage to at least 11 days; the company’s later update said home deliveries would resume from Friday, 23 October. Online sales account for about 10 per cent of Albert Heijn’s turnover.

The websites of its US chains — Stop & Shop, Giant Food, Hannaford and Food Lion — were still offline a week after the attack; US e-commerce is expected to resume “in the coming days”, while Belgium’s Delhaize is fully operational again.

The NCSC said there was no reason to believe the Dutch incident was linked to cyberattacks on refrigeration systems at French supermarkets. Ahold Delhaize said there was no evidence customer data had been stolen.