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Researchers in cybersecurity say that the recent rise in GPS “spoofing,” a type of digital attack that can throw commercial planes off course, has taken on an interesting new dimension: hackers can now hack time.
OPSGROUP, an aviation advisory group, says that there has been a 400% rise in cases of GPS spoofing that affect commercial airliners in the past few months. Many of these incidents involve illegal GPS systems on the ground, especially in war zones, that send out false positions to the airspace around them to throw off drones or missiles that are coming at them.
He said this during a presentation at the DEF CON hacking gathering in Las Vegas on Saturday: “We think too much about GPS being a source of position, but it’s actually a source of time.” Munro is the founder of the British cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners.
“There have been reports that during spoofing events, the clocks on planes start to do strange things.”
This meant that the plane could not connect to its digitally encrypted communication systems.
According to Munro, the plane was grounded for weeks while experts reset all of its systems by hand. He wouldn’t say which company or plane was involved.
Finnair Tallinn claimed that Russia, a neighboring country, was to blame for the GPS spoofing that temporarily halted flights to Tartu, an airport in eastern Estonia, in April.
GPS, which stands for “Global Positioning System,” has mostly taken the place of expensive devices on the ground that send radio waves to help planes land. But it’s also pretty simple to block or change GPS signals with parts that are cheap, easy to find and require little technical understanding.
“All it does is make things a little confusing.” You could also start what we call a “cascade of events,” in which one small thing leads to another small thing leading to something big.
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