When Your Flight’s GPS Gets Spoofed
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only taxes be exact, speeds lower before to give a bc detail. In march, in american airlines jet, a boeing triple seven was making a regularly scheduled light from new delhi to new ork. IT was a Normal flight cruising at thirty two thousand .

feet over pakistan. The pilot got this alert, saying, pull up.

Pull up. That's truth. It's jerd who covers telecoms icons for the wall street journal.

That system is known as an enhanced ground proximity warning system. And usually when that system goes off the pilot lessons and pulls the playing up.

because in almost every Normal case where a crew might hear that warning, things are not good. That sounds is there to say, hey, you might be about to fly into a melt IT you got to take action but that is not what was happening on this flight. And thankfully, the pilot knew IT.

the pilot of this, a american airlines flight knew due to the terrain that he was flying over and a the history of this area, that that alert was a false ARM.

the plane was getting a fake signal, the GPS systems .

on that plane had been spooked. Ed had been lied to. And we're telling the plane that IT was somewhere that IT was not.

According to druce reporting, this isn't a one time phenomenon. Passenger of lies around the world are being caught up by GPS booths and jamin.

We've seen steps from researchers showing that based on the publicly available data that they can an from these planes as their transmitting data back to systems on earth, that these kind of fake signals are being picked up by hundreds of lights a day. And it's something that pilots, depending on where they fly and where they Operate, are having to deal with almost every day, that they fly over a certain areas. And they have they've got to adapt to that.

Today on the show, how the aviation system faces a new kind of electronic threat in the skies, i'm lusia, and you're listening to what next TV D A show about technology, power and how the future will .

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And auto policies, try IT at progressive dot com, progressive casually insurance company and feel potential savings will very not available in all states. Even though we take G, P, S, for granted now it's on your phone, maybe in your car. Its origins go back to the sputnik ure.

In the space race between the U. S. And the soviet union, the defense department began experimenting with satellite navigation in the one thousand hundred and sixty over the years they built on network.

Decades ago, IT was also opened up to the commercial sector to civilians. It's kind of like the history of the internet away. The internet has its roots in darpa programs and in military funding that was used for a basically purely government purposes.

And eventually IT was opened up to the commercial sector. And the rest is history there, of course, the history of flight in the eighties that was flying over russia. And due to a navigation mistake, IT was shot down over russia .

on August thirty first one thousand nine hundred eighty three. A south korean airliner K A L flight zero zero seven, with two hundred and sixty nine people on board left encourage for soul, the boeing seven four seven straight from its Normal route into soviet air space.

That was a tragedy. There was a congressman on that plane that accelerated existing plans to make G, P. S. Available to the aviation sector and the public writ large, up for safety reasons. So we kind of take for granted that this system, which is reliant on it's, rely on the network of satellites that is circling the global what's medium earths orbit for pretty mh everything um it's not just way o in your car and way finding on your iphone. There is a lot of hidden things that rely on G P S uh under the hood that we don't even think about every day.

When did airlines first start experiencing the spoofing issue?

So the spooky issue was kind of new um not to get too technical, but there's there's two types of GPS interference gaming and spooky daming is basically I blast out a signal and you can pick up anything so GPS has gone forget IT accordingly and deal as if it's not there. And airlines have been ready for G, P, S. Jamming for decades. If G P S is available, there are plenty of systems on the plane allow you to navigate and plans .

without the ater GPS.

Instead of completely overwhelming a signal, spooky is more like a virus inside the GPS. IT hijacks the system, making the GPS calculate a false position. Researchers told drew that for a long time, spoofing wasn't very common. IT was mostly used in areas of heavy fighting, but recently there's been an uptake in spoofing incidents.

The spooky phenomenon has really exploded over the past year or so and its spread to wider areas of eastern europe and also the middle ast. And most people suspect that the reason that all of these spooking transmittals are being set up or blasting these fake signals is to attack drones. You really can't tell the story of GPS spooky without talking about the explosion of cheap commercial grade drones.

They are being used on the battle field. Those are flooding the market from ukraine to all around the middle st. And nations that want to protect themselves from those sorts of attacks are often turning to spoof fing to do IT.

So if you're, say a commercial airliner, do spooky and jamin present themselves differently. If you're a cruising altitude.

yeah, absolutely. So gaming wood to a pilot generally just look like your GPS has gone out and and a lot of systems on planes are ready for that. First of all, if a jamming attack happens in your GPS signal is unavailable, the navigation and other systems on the plane can just keep flying for a while.

Using what the plane knows about where IT was the last time the signal was available in gaming is something that pilots have seen off and on for many years. Their reports that you know genting isn't always like crafty nation states that are are trying to downtown ones. Sometimes it's as simple as, uh, truck drivers will buy a cheap little thing to put on their dashboard from ebay and that helps a avoid their location being tracked so they don't get docks for, you know, not blogging, travel else when they are supposed to be on the road.

That kind of thing has happened for a while. It's a new sense. It's definitely a problem. But a lot of aviation safety officials have told us that it's it's something that is managed soothing is completely different. These spooky attacks will poison the cockpit with false information that sometimes that equipment is not ready or is not smart enough to handle.

Spoofing is now common enough that pilots have started posting videos of their cockpits. When that happens, they're ying Normally, then suddenly their system and tells .

them they're in imminent danger. Often IT will look like the panel in front. The pilots will show that the GPS signal IT has been lost, and then suddenly IT may show the location of the airplane jumping around. And again, that proximately warning system that warns the plane, if it's about to fly into a mountain, will sometimes light up red and show that there is train a habitat where there was nothing before. And that is a sign that something's a little funky.

something's a miss. We talked about this happening to an american commercial flight over pakistan. Is there a particular location in the world where this is happening? After all, there's conflict in lots of places.

Ukraine in the middle east. Is this, you know, commercial airliner wanders accidentally into a spot where someone's trying to jam drone? Or is IT more targeted than that?

It's actually less targeted than than that about a year ago. This used to be really common around ukraine and other parts of eastern europe. The bulk sea.

Over the summer, there was a huge uptake in spooky attacks all around the middle st. So first of all, all of these signals are not targeting planes. They're targeting drones. I, I always have to stop myself from saying airplanes are bystanders in this because they're not standing still. They're flying at five hundred miles hour, but they're not the targets of this activity, their collateral damage.

Now a lot of these fake signals are being picked up all around israel, gaza, lebanon, syria, and they may be directed at drones that are crossing some of those borders in areas where there's active firefights going on, and there are missile and drawn attacks virtually every day. But the signals are traveling for hundreds of miles. They're going as far as cyprus.

Over the mediterranean sea, there are signals that are also coming proportionally from iron. Based on what researchers have been able to pick up from, the data is available to them. So this is a situation where, you know, as in the past, after the M.

H. Seventeen disaster, planes can just fly around the entire country of ukraine to avoid getting caught up in a firefight. Basically because the signals travels so far, there is really no way for them to completely avoids. All spooky, if they are assigned out, is between, you know, certain parts of the world. They'll have to fly through IT.

Airlines are aware of the dangers with flying over areas were spooky as common, and they train pilots to look out for IT. The problem is that not every aircraft is created equal.

Every plane and every piece of avionics equipment is slightly different, and IT reacts differently to this type of attack. So it's a lot of extra workload and a lot of extra preparation the pilots have to take to deal with the problem. And the concern that people, the aviation industry and some regulators have is that all that extra work could be a safety risk for pilots who are also having to deal with noral crises that pop up every day.

In the Normal course of commercial aviation. Sometimes engines go out, landing gear fails, storm my weather happens. And that's a safety risk. But it's a manageable risk because airlines plan for that and and the pilots are trained to deal with. But when they have this extra workload on top of that to deal with all of these technical glitches in the cockpit, that creates a lower margin of safety. That is really worrying some people.

Yeah I mean, the sort of mantra is avia, navigate, communicate. And I could understand if you are at thirty two thousand feet, like the example that we started with, you've got lots of room to aviation. You know that you have space to navigate. But every extra piece of data that is coming into a cockpit, particularly when you're talking me about a big jet with very complicated avionics, that, that is a pretty big added burden on a flight crew. absolutely.

A lot of what we've heard from pilots and from others in the aviation industry has focused on the words specifically around take off and the sentence landing um that's when the worker is highest under Normal circumstances for pilots and that's when a failure of any of these systems is the most worrisome when .

we come back, what to do about a world where GPS simply isn't reliable?

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Airlines and regulators trying to handle this well.

there's a lot going on at once. Airlines in general, are coming up with their own recommended sets of procedures to tell pilots how to deal with spoofing as they encounter IT. And IT often depends on the type of aircraft in their fleet and the areas that they tend to fly over. So airbus and boeing are also issuing guidance to airlines to share with their flight crews, but they are pretty tight lipped about the specifics because they don't want to discuss this publicly. And i've also heard from some in the industry that they're wary of talking about specifics also because if there are certain instructions or certain fixes on the technical side that could be developed to evade soothing, the same people that are developing these soothing techniques could find a way to work around that is kind of a cat mouse game.

Are there kind of malyn actors who want a spoof commercial aviation, just because we haven't .

seen any evidence of that, that would be much more dangerous than that would be much more worrisome. But so far, most of the people that we've talked to who work in aviation or who are experts in GPS and navigation systems, say that all of these attacks are not necessarily targeting airplanes, but the same techniques that can be used to downtown ones or send them off course could be improved, developed to make that spooky even more effective.

And the problem is these drones are sucking up the same commercial GPS signals, the same civilian G, P. S. Signals that airplanes are. And that's a big difference. And that's a big debate that looms over this whole issue is the fact that really no matter who is using this GPS signal, they're all drawing on the same civilian GPS signal.

If you are a defense contractor in your manufacturing a fighter jet or misser even some artillery shells that can be stored as their uh falling down on their targets, they can often use military signals. Those are encrypted with the m code and that is very tightly controlled by the U. S. government. They do not want to offer that to the commercial sector because they rely on IT to develop their weapons.

Well, is there a way then to look at this from the other end and say, we wait him in IT? Our civilian G, P. S. System should be more robust and less vulnerable to this kind of thing.

Yeah, there's a lot of talk about that and there are no easy solutions. First of all, there's basic discussion about really using technology that already is out there in the field to put G, P, S in tennis, in airplanes that are smarter. Sometimes IT could be as simple as just installing in in tanna that can tell which direction the signal is coming from and will listen to anything from that is coming up from the sky and will disregard anything that's coming from the ground, because if a GPS signal is coming from below, the airplane is probably not real.

The problem with that is that actually considered, under the rules today, controlled military grade technology and their restrictions on how even those antennas, which just perceive signal, were not talking about any kind of weapons here, how they can be installed in civilian aircraft. Now i've talked to people who say that those rules could change um or at least could be loosened in the near future. But that doesn't solve the problem immediately because installing anything on an airplane, especially if IT helps fly the airplane, is a really time consuming process and IT probably wouldn't be something that could be put into new airliners for at least a couple years.

The same goes for picking up new types of navigation signals. But even if that were to happen, first of all, snoozing can fake any of these signals. And second of all, I would take .

years to put in. You know, earlier in this conversation, you mentioned both and seventeen malaysian airliner that would shut down by russian back separates server ukraine. You also mentioned the korean air flight h that was shot down over russia thousand nine hundred eighty three.

And those are obviously the worst case scenario that I think someone's mind goes to when you talk about gaming or spoofing. When the airlines in the F, A, A and the, you know, satellite, the industry, think about this just booking, raise the risk of something that tragic happening. Well.

I wouldn't to go too far and compare the threat from this type of spoofing to what happened in one thousand nine hundred and eighty three. Um first of all, airlines are much safer than they were in the eighties, not just because of all these new systems that rely on G P S signals, uh, where they didn't before. There's a lot of other safety systems that are installed on planes that we're available.

Then the main risk that flight crews talk about um if they have to highlight one over all the others, is that enhanced ground proximity warning system. It's the systems that warn plains if they are flying too low, close to terrain that is very high, close to mountains. There are two versions of that system.

There's the original ground praxiteles warning system that has been credited with saving thousands of lives because flying, especially mountain areas, became much safer after those were. And the enhanced versions drew on GPS to make them even safer and give pilots even more time to react to those warnings so that they can keep the plain flying on course. The main concern that we hear from pilots about those systems, specifically the enhanced version of this system, because the enhanced version relies on GPS data, is that because this spoon fed data is contaminating the warning system with false information about where they're flying their worries, the pilots are going to disregard them. So boy who cried what type situation, and they'll disregarded enough that when in a real situation where a legit alert is going off, they don't react or don't act quickly enough.

In the past, commercial aviation has illy just not flown over a lot of conflict zones. But you know, listening to you when we talk about swooping in, jamming, you said, you know, these things can travel hundreds of miles. We're not talking about things that are restricted to small areas. Does this come along with I get a wholesale rethinking of how flight paths may be need to be kind of retailed in electronic cage?

I think you could start having that discussion, but I don't think I would. You go very far because there is really no way to avoids some of these areas short of cancelling the flight. There are so many zones that a lot of airlines are not allowed to fly over most of rock, all of russia, ukraine, in certain cases, the black sea.

I can go on and on that if these airlines want to get to their destination, they're going to have to fly into through some areas where spooking ing is known to happen. There's just no way around IT. Part of that reason is again, just because of how old GPS G P S.

Has been around for fifty years. It's kind of the victim of its own success because it's gained a reputation not only for being extremely dependable because of that airlines just built so many systems into their newer aircraft to treat G, P, S as the gold standard. And that is part of the problem because it's not easy to flip all of those systems of a lot of times, it's not easy to reset these GPS systems while the plane is flying.

That caused, you know some heart burn among the regulators in the airlines because some of them don't necessarily want to tell pilots go ahead, flit the circuit, break ers on the GPS in the aircraft wallets flying because it's not something that they design the system to to do while in fly. So yeah, I mean, to to answer your question, there really is no around this growing. And part of the reason is, again, because G P S is very old and the signal is very reliable, but it's actually very, very thin, which means doesn't take a lot of money or expertise now to pull up a truck anywhere in a country that wants to send off these drones and blast a signal that it's onna drown IT out for miles many, many miles away.

Truth, it's girl. Thank you so much for your reporting and for talking with me.

Thanks for jeff is jill .

is a telecomm reporter for the wall street journal and that is IT for our show today. What next T V D is produced event cambell, Patrick ford, elisa jung Perry and shine a off. Our show was edited by page osborne.

Allega on gammarus is vice president of audio for sate and tb. D is part of the larger what next family. And if you like what you hurt today, the single best way to support us is to join sleep pass.

You get all your sleep podcasts like this one, and free alright will be back next week with more episodes. I'm lusia. I thanks for listening.

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