The recent rise in GPS spoofing, a form of digital attack that can throw commercial aircraft off course, has taken on a fascinating new dimension, according to cybersecurity researchers: the ability to hack time.
According to aviation advisory group OPSGROUP, there has been a 400 percent increase in GPS spoofing incidents on commercial aircraft in recent months.
Many of these incidents involve illegal ground-based GPS systems, particularly near conflict zones, transmitting false positioning data to the surrounding airspace to confuse incoming drones or missiles.
“We think too much about GPS being a source of positioning, but actually it’s a source of time,” said Ken Munro, founder of Pen Test Partners, a British cybersecurity company, during a presentation at the DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas.
“We are increasingly receiving reports of the clocks on board aircraft doing strange things during spoofing incidents.”
In an interview with ReutersMunro referred to a recent incident in which the onboard clocks of a major Western airline were suddenly set forward by years, leaving the aircraft unable to access its digitally encrypted communications systems.
The plane remained grounded for weeks while engineers manually reset the onboard systems, Munro said, declining to name the airline or the plane involved.
In April, Finnair temporarily suspended flights to the eastern Estonian city of Tartu due to GPS spoofing, which Tallinn blamed on neighboring Russia.
GPS is short for Global Positioning System and has largely replaced expensive ground equipment that emits radio beams to guide aircraft to land.
However, it is also relatively easy to block or distort GPS signals using relatively cheap and easily obtained parts and with limited technical knowledge.
“Will it lead to a plane crash? No, it won’t,” Munro said ^ “Reuters”.
“It just creates a little confusion. And you run the risk of setting off what we call a cascade of events where something small happens, something else small happens and then something serious happens.”
