from Hacker News

GPS signal disturbed at altitudes above 2000-3000 feet over Norway [pdf]

by 3eto on 11/4/17, 8:57 AM with 68 comments

• by lisper on 11/4/17, 5:29 PM

  It is worth noting that there are two different ways to attack GPS: jamming and spoofing. Jamming is when you broadcast a noise signal at the GPS frequency, which prevents affected receivers from receiving the GPS signal. The result is that the GPS doesn't know where it is. Spoofing is when you send out a fake GPS signal that appears genuine but has the wrong timing. The result is that the GPS thinks it knows where it is, but it's wrong. Spoofing is more difficult -- and far more serious -- than jamming. What is reported here appears to be (an attempt at) jamming, but spoofing attacks have also been reported in the past.

  https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/gps_spoofing_...

• by johansch on 11/4/17, 3:19 PM

  I experienced a very odd GPS failures about a week later (September 24) in south-eastern Sweden. At one point I was driving for about an hour (in quite isolated areas - around https://www.google.com/maps/@58.0381615,16.2094966,13.37z) without my iphone being able to get a gps fix. It's never happened before, or since.

  The phone was fixed to the car's front window with plenty of sight towards the sky. I rebooted the device twice but it didn't help.

  Our natural instinct here is to blame the russians for these kinds of things. At this time our biggest military exercise since the 90s was taking place in this region, with a lot of US involvement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_17

  (One random theory: the russians were trying out some kind of remote, localized target GPS jamming tech. The GPS outage stopped once I got closer to the largest city in the region (150k people).

  Additional rationale: If they unleashed GPS jamming signals that made hundreds of thousands of people lose GPS it would probably have made news. By localizing it to just affecting a couple of hundred people in isolated areas they would avoid that kind of mess.)

• by cesis on 11/4/17, 5:03 PM

  There's was also some cellphone outage reported in Baltic

  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/latvias-cellphon...

• by otp124 on 11/4/17, 3:08 PM

  I don’t see the assumption of the cause in the PDF (difficult to read on this tiny mobile device).

  Could it be iron ore or something else affecting the magnetic fields? Does this happen elsewhere on earth?

• by cozzyd on 11/4/17, 5:06 PM

  Would be interesting to see if this shows up in GPS occultation data.

• by UncleEntity on 11/4/17, 4:14 PM

  There was massive solar flare activity in September which may (or may not) have something to do with this.