LAS VEGAS: The recent rise in GPS spoofing, a form of digital attack that can knock commercial aircraft off course, has taken on an intriguing new dimension, cybersecurity researchers say: the ability to hack time.
According to aviation advisory body OPSGROUP, there has been a 400 percent increase in GPS spoofing incidents on commercial aircraft in recent months. Many of these incidents are due to illegal ground-based GPS systems that send false positioning data to the surrounding airspace, particularly in conflict zones, 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 firm, during a presentation at the DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas on Saturday.
“We are increasingly receiving reports of the clocks on board aircraft doing strange things during spoofing incidents.”
In an interview with Reuters, Munro referred to a recent incident in which the onboard clocks of a major Western airline suddenly moved 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 because of GPS spoofing there, which Tallinn blamed on neighboring Russia.
GPS, short for Global Positioning System, has largely replaced expensive ground-based equipment that sends out radio beams to guide aircraft to land. But it is also relatively easy to block or distort GPS signals using relatively cheap and readily available parts and with limited technical knowledge.
“Will there be a plane crash? No, there won’t,” Munro told 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.”
