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LAS VEGAS: Cybersecurity researchers say a recent surge in GPS “spoofing,” a form of digital attack that can cause commercial airliners to veer off course, has taken on an intriguing new dimension: the ability to hack time.
According to aviation consultancy OPSGROUP, incidents of GPS spoofing affecting commercial airliners have surged 400% in recent months. Many of these incidents involve rogue ground-based GPS systems, particularly in conflict zones, that broadcast false locations to surrounding airspace to confuse incoming drones or missiles.
“We think too much about GPS as a source of location, but it’s actually a source of time,” Ken Munro, founder of British cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners, said during a speech at the DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas on Saturday.
“We’re starting to see reports of clocks on airplanes behaving strangely in instances of spoofing.”
In an interview with Reuters, Munro mentioned a recent incident in which the onboard clocks on a plane of a major Western airline were suddenly moved forward several years, rendering the plane unable to access its digitally encrypted communications system.
The plane was grounded for weeks while engineers manually reset the onboard systems, said Munro, who declined to name the airline or plane involved.
In April, Finnair suspended flights to the eastern Estonian city of Tartu over GPS spoofing, which Tartu blamed on neighboring Russia.
GPS, short for Global Positioning System, has largely replaced expensive ground-based equipment that beams radio waves to guide aircraft to land. However, it is also easy to block or distort GPS signals using relatively cheap and readily available parts and limited technical knowledge.
“Will this cause the plane to crash? No,” Munro told Reuters.
“It just creates a little bit of chaos. And you run the risk of setting off what we call a chain reaction, where something minor happens, something minor happens, and then something serious happens.”
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