According to cybersecurity researchers, there has been a recent increase in GPS “spoofing,” a type of digital attack that can cause commercial aeroplanes to go off course. This new dimension is the ability to hack time. OPSGROUP, an aviation advisory body, reports that there has been a 400% increase in GPS spoofing incidents affecting commercial airlines in recent months.
In an attempt to confuse approaching drones or missiles, a number of those incidents involve illegal ground-based GPS systems, especially in conflict areas where they broadcast inaccurate positions to the surrounding airspace.
“We think too much about GPS being a source of position, but it’s actually a source of time. We’re starting to see reports of the clocks on board aeroplanes during spoofing events starting to do weird things,” Ken Munro, founder of Pen Test Partners, a British cybersecurity firm, said during a presentation at the DEF CON hacking convention in Las Vegas.
Munro mentioned a recent incident in a Reuters interview, where a major Western airline’s aircraft experienced a sudden forwarding of its onboard clocks by years, resulting in the plane losing access to its digitally encrypted communication systems. Munro stated that the plane was grounded for several weeks as engineers reset all of its internal systems by hand. He refused to name the airline or the particular aircraft.
Due to GPS spoofing in April 2024, which Tallin attributed to nearby Russia, Finnair had to temporarily halt flights to Tartu in eastern Estonia. The costly ground instruments that transmit radio beams to direct aircraft toward landing have mostly been replaced by the GPS, or global positioning system.
On the other hand, with a little technological know-how and some easily accessible and inexpensive parts, it is also fairly simple to block or tamper with GPS signals.
“Is it going to cause a plane crash? No, it’s not. What it does is it just creates a little confusion. And you run the risk of starting what we call a cascade of events, where something minor happens, something else minor happens, and then something serious happens,” Munro concluded.