The outage in GPS services began to worsen on Christmas Day. Planes and ships moving southern sweden and Poland They lost connectivity on December 25 because their radio signals were interfered with. Since then, the region around the Baltic Sea (including neighboring Germany, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) has faced persistent attacks against GPS systems.
Tens of thousands of aircraft flying in the region have reported problems with their navigation systems in recent months amid widespread jamming attacks, which can render GPS inoperable. As attacks have increased, Russia has increasingly been blamed, with open source researchers tracing the source to Russian regions such as Kaliningrad. In one case, the signs were interrupted for 47 hours straight. On Monday, marking one of the most serious incidents yet, Finnair airline canceled its flights to Tartu, Estonia, for a month, after GPS interference forced two of its planes to abort landings at the airport and turn around.
Interference in the Baltic region, which was first seen in early 2022, is just the tip of the iceberg. In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in attacks against GPS signals and broader satellite navigation systems, known as GNSS, including those in Europe, China and Russia. Attacks can jam signals, forcing them to go offline, or spoof signals, causing planes and ships to appear in false locations on maps. Beyond the Batlics, war zones around Ukraine and the Middle East have also seen sharp increases in GPS outages, including signal jamming intended to disrupt airstrikes.
Now, governments and telecommunications and aviation safety experts are increasingly sounding the alarm about disruptions and the potential for major disasters. The foreign ministers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have everyone blamed Russia for GPS problems in the Baltics this week and said the threat should be taken seriously.
“It cannot be ruled out that this interference is a form of hybrid warfare with the aim of creating uncertainty and unrest,” Jimmie Adamsson, head of public affairs at the Swedish Navy, tells WIRED. “Of course, there is concern, particularly in the civil aviation and maritime sector, that an accident could occur leading to an environmental disaster. “There is also a risk that ships and planes will stop traffic to this area and therefore global trade will be affected.”
“An increasing threat situation should be expected in relation to GPS jamming,” Joe Wagner, spokesperson for Germany’s Federal Information Security Office, told WIRED, stating that there are technical ways to reduce its impact. Officials in Finland also say they have seen an increase in airline disruptions across the country and surrounding areas. And a spokesperson for the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, tells WIRED that the number of jamming and spoofing incidents has “increased significantly” over the past four years and that jamming with signals is prohibited. radio. under ITU rules.
Booming
Attacks against GPS, and the broader category of GNSS, come in two forms. First, GPS jamming seeks to nullify the radio signals that make up GPS and render systems unusable. Second, spoofing attacks can replace the original token with a new location; Counterfeit ships can, for example, appear on maps as if they were at inland airports.
Both types of interference increase in frequency. The outages, at least at this stage, primarily affect planes flying at high altitudes and ships that may be in open water, not people’s individual phones or other systems that rely on GPS.