The High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Policy, Kaja Kallas, has left open this Monday the possibility of approving a new package of sanctions against Iran as a result of the recent cyberattacks against supermarket chains in several European countries, incidents that have been attributed to Tehran. As she indicated, the foreign ministers of the Twenty-Seven will be able to address this matter in depth at their meeting next Monday, November 16.
"We have just learned that they have been attributed to Iran. Until now, we did not know about that attribution," the head of European diplomacy said in statements to the press from Paris, where she is participating in a meeting of the G7 foreign ministers, when asked about the option of applying restrictive measures against the Iranian authorities.
Kallas detailed that the foreign ministers of the member states will meet next Monday at the Foreign Affairs Council (FAC), a forum in which they will be able to analyze in greater detail the information available about the alleged Iranian involvement in these cyberattacks and assess a possible joint response at the European level.
"If there are attributions, our response must be firm," she stressed, after the French prosecutor’s office opened proceedings against the leader of a group linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard for the cyberattack that in October affected the refrigeration systems of supermarkets in France.
In reaction to these episodes, the European Commission convened on November 3 two coordination meetings with the European agencies and the member states affected, in which Europol, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) and the European Network of Liaison Organizations for Cybersecurity Crises (EU-CyCLONe) took part.
At that time, the Community spokesperson for digital affairs, Thomas Regnier, warned that these attacks were not "isolated incidents," although he avoided commenting on their source and emphasized that it is the national authorities that are responsible for investigating the facts and determining who is behind the cyberattacks.