By James Pearson
LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – The recent surge in “GPS spoofing,” a form of digital attack that can send commercial passenger planes off course, has entered an intriguing new dimension: the ability to hack time, cybersecurity researchers say.
According to an aviation consultancy, there has been a 400% increase in GPS spoofing incidents affecting commercial aircraft in recent months. Many of these incidents involve illicit GPS systems, particularly around conflict zones, broadcasting incorrect locations into surrounding airspace in an attempt to mislead incoming drones or missiles.
“We often think of 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 presentation at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas on Saturday.
“We’re starting to see reports that the clocks on board aircraft during tampering operations are starting to do strange things.”
In an interview with Reuters, Munro cited a recent incident in which the clocks on board a major Western airline were suddenly advanced by years, causing the plane to lose access to digitally encrypted communications systems.
The plane remained grounded for weeks while engineers manually recalibrated its onboard systems, Monroe said. He declined to identify the airline or aircraft involved.
In April, Finnair temporarily suspended flights to the eastern Estonian city of Tartu due to GPS tampering, which Tallinn blamed on neighbouring Russia.
GPS has replaced expensive ground-based instruments that send out radio beams to guide aircraft to land. However, GPS signals are also easy to block or distort using cheap, readily available parts and limited technological know-how.
“Will that cause a plane to crash? No, it won’t,” Monroe told Reuters.
“What this does is it creates a little bit of confusion. It puts you at risk of starting what we call a chain of events, where something minor happens, then something minor happens, then something serious happens.”
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