By James Pearson
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – A recent surge in “GPS spoofing,” a form of digital attack that can cause commercial airliners to veer off course, has entered an intriguing new dimension, according to cybersecurity researchers: the ability to hack the weather.
According to aviation advisory body OPSGROUP, there has been a 400% increase in GPS spoofing incidents affecting commercial aircraft in recent months. Many of those incidents involve illicit ground-based GPS systems, particularly in conflict zones, which transmit incorrect positions into the surrounding airspace in an attempt to confuse approaching drones or missiles.
“We think too much about GPS as a source of position, but it’s actually a source of time,” said Ken Munro, founder of Pen Test Partners, a British cybersecurity firm, during a presentation at the DEF CON hacking convention in Las Vegas on Saturday.
“We are starting to see reports that watches on board airplanes during phishing events are starting to do strange things.”
In an interview with Reuters, Munro cited a recent incident in which a plane operated by a major Western airline had its onboard clocks suddenly set forward a few years, causing the plane to lose access to its digitally encrypted communications systems.
The plane was grounded for weeks while engineers manually reset its onboard systems, said Munro, who declined to identify the airline or the plane in question.
In April, Finnair temporarily suspended its flights to the eastern Estonian city of Tartu due to GPS spoofing that Tallinn blamed on neighbouring Russia.
GPS, short for Global Positioning System, has largely replaced expensive ground-based devices that transmit radio beams to guide planes to landing. However, it is also fairly easy to jam or distort GPS signals using relatively cheap and easy-to-obtain parts and limited technological know-how.
“Is it going to cause a plane crash? No, it's not,” Munro told Reuters.
“What it does is create a bit of confusion and you run the risk of starting what we call a cascade of events, where something minor happens, then something minor happens, and then something serious happens.”
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