Ships that appear to be sailing through landlocked airports. Dating apps that match Israelis with Lebanese, assuming they are in one place. Tourist flights forced to turn around — mid-air — after sudden navigation troubles.
Such is the fallout from a surge in the manipulation of navigation signals — modern GPS warfare — that has played havoc with civilian smartphones, planes and vessels on three continents.
So-called GPS jamming and spoofing have largely been the preserve of militaries over the past two decades, used to defend sensitive sites against drone or missile attacks or mask their own activities.
But systematic interference by armed forces — particularly following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza — has caused widespread issues for civilian populations as well. The footprint of corrupted signals has become vast.
Almost 40mn people lived in areas with unreliable GPS signals for at least half of the past six months, according to Financial Times analysis of data from the tracking service Flightradar24. This includes Turkey’s capital Ankara, where its armed forces are based, stretches of the Black Sea coastline, Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, several of Iraq’s biggest cities and war-torn Myanmar’s borders.
Strong interference — causing issues for at least a quarter of the time — has also affected areas with a combined population of 110mn, including cities with military facilities such as St Petersburg in Russia, Lahore in Pakistan and Beirut, Lebanon.
“Primarily it’s driven by the desire to protect military targets,” said Thomas Withington of Rusi, a London-based defence think-tank. “Drones and guided weapons tend to rely on GNSS. Putting out a jamming signal restricts their ability to navigate properly.” GPS is part of GNSS, the umbrella term for all global navigation satellite systems.
Nato has blamed Russia for such GNSS interruptions across large parts of Europe, including one that affected a flight carrying the UK defence secretary. Conflict in the Middle East has also increased GPS manipulation in the region. Some world leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, reportedly use mobile jammers for protection when travelling.
But the bogus signals used in jamming — which work by overwhelming receivers with noisy data — do not discriminate between military and civilian devices. Baltic government officials warned last month of a looming air disaster after GNSS failure forced two Finnair flights to turn around mid-air.
Alarmed over the potential dangers, the Pentagon has launched a project dubbed “Harmonious Rook” to create a comprehensive “weather map” of interference, which it told the FT is a “significant concern for global users”.
Almost all aircraft have alternative positioning systems, including inertial navigation using motion sensors. But switching to back-ups increases the risk of error. One plane nearly veered into Iranian airspace last year, while in 2019 a US flight almost hit a mountain after being jammed, according to a Nasa report. Eurocontrol, the EU’s air traffic regulator, reported a 2,000 per cent increase in incidents of interference between 2018 and 2021.
“This is a dangerous situation,” said Todd Humphreys, an expert in GNSS interference at the University of Texas at Austin. “Pilots can become so confused about their location, they end up having to call aircraft control and ask for turn-by-turn directions . . . It’s past the line of just a nuisance.”
Such instrument landings are reported to be almost routine at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion airport. The Israel Defense Forces have acknowledged blocking GPS signals in Israel as a defensive measure following the Hamas militant group’s October 7 attacks and Iranian missile launches last month.
Residents of Israel, Jordan and Lebanon complain the interference has made it impossible to use taxi, takeaway or dating apps. Médecins Sans Frontières and Medical Aid for Palestinians told the FT that constant connection problems have hampered their relief efforts in Gaza.
But in recent months there has been a surge in a more sophisticated form of GNSS interference — so-called spoofing.
The most basic form, sometimes used by ships picking up illicit cargo, simply transmits a false location signal. This tactic is commonly used to circumvent sanctions or other regulatory restrictions, such as fishing rights.
But increasingly spoofers — which may be located on the ground or even on warships — appear to be indiscriminately corrupting the GNSS signals of nearby vessels and aircraft by broadcasting fake positions. The results generate peculiar transport illusions, including ships sailing over land or planes that appear to jump to locations hundreds of kilometres away.
Spoofing is also considered even more dangerous than jamming, as the false signals can deceive the detection systems built into many GPS receivers.
In April, as many as 30,000 aircraft were affected by spoofing, according to analysis of OpenSky data by SkAi Data Services. In several cases, crews lost all navigational capabilities, the International Civil Aviation Organization said in February.
Shipping relies less on GNSS positioning. But the surge in spoofing in straits around the Black Sea in particular — which is almost certainly linked to Russian military activity — poses a risk of collisions and even an oil spill, experts warn.
“It’s a very, very congested area . . . it’s a recipe for disaster,” said Bridget Diakun, an analyst at shipping info provider Lloyd’s List who first spotted the unusual activity affecting cargo ships and oil tankers in the Black Sea in October.
Francis Zachariae, secretary-general of IALA, a maritime navigation association, said trained navigators can easily deal with the problem but raised concerns that less-skilled crew might depend too much on automated systems.
One of the mysteries of modern GNSS warfare is why spoofed ships and planes commonly appear at airports. Some analysts speculate that the phenomenon may stem from attempts to trigger drones to shut off when it is detected in the protected airspace of an airport; affected planes and vessels may be accidentally caught by these widely broadcast signals.
Most experts agree that it is unlikely civilians are the direct target of the activity — although Dr Melanie Garson, who researches cyber warfare at UCL, said some instances could represent “a flexing of muscle” on the part of Russia.
Governments are starting to take a tougher line and even openly blame alleged perpetrators. Lebanon threatened to report Israel to the UN Security Council over GNSS interference in March, while Estonia’s foreign minister told the FT some of the incidents were part of a “hybrid attack” from Russia.
Lord David Cameron, UK foreign secretary, described reports that defence secretary Grant Shapps’ plane experienced GPS jamming near the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad as “very disturbing”, adding it was “extremely irresponsible for Russia to do this”. There is no evidence that Shapps’ plane was specifically targeted, but the area is a hotspot for interference.
Officials might not be able to do more, according to Elisabeth Braw, a researcher at US international affairs think-tank Atlantic Council.
“It’s not as if [Nato] are going to declare Article 5 [the alliance’s collective defence clause] because Russia is endangering aviation in the Baltic region. So you can essentially engage in this sort of activity as you wish, because there’s so little punishment for it.”
Work is under way to find alternatives to GNSS, which is inherently vulnerable because its signals are on shared frequency bands and operate at low strengths.
They include eLoran, a ground-based radio-navigation system. Licences to use the technology in the UK have been available since October but just one had been issued, according to Ofcom’s website. Other proposals include positioning based on anomalies in the earth’s magnetic field.
Airlines in particular have been slow to heed warnings, said Humphreys. “The systems that they are fielding in modern aircraft . . . still do not have sufficient protection against spoofing and jamming.”
But while for now aviation interference is grabbing headlines, GNSS technology is ubiquitous across civil society. Banks, railways and emergency services all rely on the system for timing as well as positioning data.
“All of us need to be very cognisant of how reliant on GNSS we are in our daily lives,” said Withington at Rusi.
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