On Christmas Day, the disruption to GPS services got worse. Planes and ships moving in southern Sweden and Poland lost communication on December 25 as their radio signals were jammed. Since then, the region around the Baltic Sea – including neighboring Germany, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – has been subjected to sustained attacks on GPS systems.
Tens of thousands of planes flying in the region have reported problems with their navigation systems in recent months due to widespread jamming attacks that can cause GPS to stop working. As attacks increased, Russia was increasingly blamed Open source researchers are tracking the source in Russian regions such as Kaliningrad. In one case it was signals Disturbed for 47 hours straight. On Monday, airline Finnair canceled its flights to Tartu, Estonia for a month, marking one of the worst incidents ever, after GPS glitches forced two of its planes to abort landing at the airport and turn back.
The traffic jam in the Baltics that was first spotted in early 2022, is just the tip of the iceberg. Recent years have seen a rapid increase in attacks on GPS signals and broader satellite navigation systems known as GNSS, including in Europe, China and Russia. The attacks can jam signals, effectively knocking them offline, or the signals can be spoofed, causing planes and ships to appear in incorrect locations on maps. Outside of the Batlics, war zones around Ukraine and the Middle East have also seen a sharp increase in GPS jamming, including signal blockages intended to thwart airstrikes.
Now governments, telecommunications and aviation safety experts are increasingly sounding the alarm about the disruption and the possibility of major disasters. Foreign ministers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all this week blamed Russia for GPS problems in the Baltics and said the threat must be taken seriously.
“It cannot be ruled out that this jamming is a form of hybrid warfare with the aim of creating insecurity and unrest,” Jimmie Adamsson, head of public affairs for the Swedish Navy, told WIRED. “Of course there is concern, especially in civil shipping and aviation, that an accident could lead to an environmental disaster. There is also a risk that ships and aircraft could stop traffic in the area, thereby affecting global trade.”
“An increasing threat situation is to be expected in connection with GPS interference,” Joe Wagner, spokesman for the Federal Office for Information Security, told WIRED, saying there are technical options to reduce the impact. Officials in Finland also say they have also seen an increase in disruptions to airlines in and around the country. And a spokesman for the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations agency, tells WIRED that the number of jamming and spoofing incidents has “increased significantly” over the past four years and jamming of radio signals is prohibited under ITU rules.
On the upswing
Attacks on GPS and the broader GNSS category come in two forms. First, GPS jamming aims to overwhelm the radio signals that make up GPS and render the systems unusable. Second, spoofing attacks can replace the original signal with a new location – for example, fake ships can appear on maps as if they were at inland airports.
Both types of interference have a higher frequency. The disruptions, at least at this point, primarily affect aircraft flying at high altitudes and ships that may be in open water, but not people’s individual phones or other systems that rely on GPS.