Blog editor’s note: Cyber-security officials and experts have always seemed resistant to the idea that GPS jamming and spoofing were cyber problems. This has never made sense to us. Disrupting GPS and other PNT can disable end use devices, degrade or disable networks, and provide false data for immediate use and long term storage. We recommended to the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity that PNT disruption be formally recognized as a cyber problem and resilient, difficult to disrupt, wide area PNT be identified as a need.
The below article from “GPS World” increases our concerns and reinforces these recommendations. DG
November 29, 2016, by GPS World Staff
As manufacturers convert machines and appliances into remotely controllable objects (the Internet of Things), the potential for spoofing expands, perhaps exponentially. Hackers could interfere with the data supplied to autonomous cars or tracks, remotely forcing them to crash.
Although the dangers of GPS spoofing have been pointedly discussed in may technical papers and articles in GPS World since the early 2000s, manufacturers have not devoted much attention to them because there weren’t many devices making use of location-based technologies, according to associate professor Dinesh Manandhar of the University of Tokyo.
With the proliferation of GPS-capable smartphones and other networked devices, “anyone can become a target of the attack,” Manandhar told the Japan Times in a recent interview.
“Too many things today use GPS as a reliable source of location information,” Manandhar said. “People trust the location information from GPS satellites like God. When PCs became common for many people, the sudden outbreak of computer viruses became an issue around the world, and anti-virus software become an essential tool for everyone to protect their data,” he added. “The same thing is now happening around GPS. We need a system to fight back against the risk.”
