A Dassault Falcon at Edinburgh Airport. The cyber attack is believed to be the first GPS jam on a commercial flight
Credit: Alamy
A plane’s GPS was jammed on a commercial transatlantic route for the first time,raising fears thousands of other flights are at risk of being deliberately hacked.
The flight from Madrid to Toronto is likely to have been deliberately targeted rather than being accidentally caught in the “usual spillover” of electronic warfare,one analyst said.
The suspected cyber attack happened in the northeastern Atlantic when a pilot reported being blocked from ascending to a higher altitude because the GPS (global positioning system) of the aircraft above them had been jammed,according to the Institute for the Study of War think tank.
The cause of the jamming has not yet been identified,but GPS jamming has been recently reported over Poland and the Baltic region and attributed to Russian electronic warfare.
The Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation said the aircraft would have likely flown over the Baltic or Middle East and had not recovered by the time it reached Shanwick Ocean Control,an international airspace zone that handles 80 per cent of transatlantic flights.
If GPS jamming becomes frequent over the Atlantic Ocean then “thousands of flights a day could be impacted with delays and cancellations”,the foundation said.
Todd Humphreys,an expert on satellite navigation,said the incident appeared to be a “more deliberate attack against commercial aircraft” rather than “the usual spillover of electronic warfare”.
“It could be individual hackers who have learned from media reports how vulnerable commercial aircraft are to GPS jamming,” Dr Humphreys told The Telegraph.
“It’s hard to see why a state actor would do this,though I don’t deny that Russia’s penchant for hybrid warfare that involves creating whatever mayhem it can in the West.”
Keir Giles,an expert on Russian military strategy,said Moscow’s GPS jamming had become “gradually normalised” and that “the disruption and the areas affected have both been steadily growing over year”.
It affects the “nuts and bolts of satellite navigation systems”,either knocking them offline or giving pilots misleading information,he said.
Mr Giles continued: “It means that systems reliant on satellite connections cannot keep accurate time,and outages of terrain and collision warning systems have become routine.
“Where smaller airports are fully reliant on GPS-based services,landing becomes impossible and flights have to divert or even give up altogether and return to their starting point.”
Downing Street said the incident did not interfere with the safety of the RAF’s Envoy,a Dassault 900LX aircraft.
However,a source told The Telegraph at the time: “While the RAF are well prepared to deal with this,it still puts an unnecessary risk on civilian aircraft and could potentially endanger people’s lives.”
Mr Giles,author of the forthcoming book Who Will Defend Europe?,said the West had failed to respond to Russian GPS jamming when it was first detected in the 2010s.
“It’s another example of hostile action from Russia becoming gradually normalised because nobody is willing or able to deal with it,which in turn encourages Russia to do it more,” he said.
“If nothing continues to be done to deter Russia from doing this,the logical next step is for Moscow to attempt to block GPS for road traffic too,which… could sow chaos on land across the region.”
© OfficialAffairs
