Security News > 2022 > March > Finnish govt agency warns of unusual aircraft GPS interference
Finland's Transport and Communications Agency, Traficom, has issued a public announcement informing of an unusual spike in GPS interference near the country's eastern border.
Notably, on Sunday, several Transaviabaltika planes flying to Savonlinna, Finland, were forced to return to Tallinn, Estonia, due to a failure in the onboard GPS navigation system.
GPS is a radio-navigation system relying on a link of four or more satellites that beam geolocation and time information to the receiver.
If something interrupts that link or hijacks the receiver's focus to a ground-based system disguised as a GPS satellite, the navigation becomes unreliable.
The equipment required to perform these spoofing attacks costs a couple of hundred USD, while the software to simulate realistic GPS satellite radio signals is generally widely available.
GPS spoofing is hard to stop because the signal the satellites emit from low-Earth orbit to potentially add encryption and certificates cannot be changed.