Rise of GPS Attacks: Commercial Flights Vulnerable to Hackers
Commercial flights in the Middle East have been experiencing "unthinkable" GPS spoofing attacks since September, causing navigation systems to fail and planes to go off course. The spoofed GPS signals have fooled the planes' systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their actual location, with fallback navigation systems also being corrupted. OPSGROUP, an international group of pilots and flight technicians, has tracked over 50 incidents in the last five weeks and identified three new types of navigation spoofing incidents. The attacks have exposed a fundamental flaw in avionics design, as the spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System, a critical component for navigation. The cause and perpetrators of these attacks remain unclear, and there is currently no solution to the problem, leaving flight crews to rely on air traffic control for assistance.