Anika Begay
By James Pearson
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – The recent wave of GPS “spoofing,” a form of digital attack that can divert airliners from their routes, has reached an intriguing new dimension: the ability to hack the weather, cybersecurity researchers say.
According to aviation advisory body OPSGROUP, there has been a 400% increase in GPS spoofing incidents involving commercial airliners in recent months. Many of these incidents involve rogue ground-based GPS systems, particularly in conflict zones, broadcasting incorrect positions to surrounding airspace in an attempt to confuse incoming drones or missiles.
“We think too much of GPS as a source of location, but it’s actually a source of time,” Ken Munro, founder of Pen Test Partners, a British cybersecurity firm, said in a presentation at the DEF CON hacking convention in Las Vegas on Saturday.
“We’re starting to see reports of watches on airplanes starting to do strange things during spoofing events.”
In an interview with Reuters, Munro cited a recent incident in which the onboard clocks of a plane operated by a major Western airline were suddenly moved forward by years, causing the plane to lose access to its digitally encrypted communications systems.
The plane was grounded for weeks while engineers manually restored its onboard systems, Munro said. He declined to identify the airline or the plane in question.
In April, Finnair temporarily suspended flights to the eastern Estonian city of Tartu due to a GPS spoofing problem, which Tallinn blamed on neighboring Russia.
GPS, short for Global Positioning System, has largely replaced expensive ground-based devices that broadcast radio signals to guide planes to land. However, it is also fairly easy to block or distort GPS signals using relatively cheap, readily available components and limited technological knowledge.
“Is it going to crash? No, it’s not going to,” Munro told Reuters.
“What it does is it just creates a little bit of confusion. And you run the risk of starting what we call a cascade of events, where something minor happens, something minor happens, and then something major happens.”
