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In a statement May 22, the Space Force said this specialized environment will be crucial for training service personnel, known as guardians, to defend critical satellites and other spacecraft from electronic attacks. Satellites rely on electromagnetic signals for communication, navigation, and data transmission, making them vulnerable to jamming and cyberattacks.

Jamming and spoofing attacks on GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are becoming increasingly common as geopolitical crises escalate, creating major challenges and risks for aviation, shipping and other critical services across the world.

Data from GPSJam.org has confirmed widespread GPS/GNSS interference across parts of Europe and beyond as an outcome of the war in Ukraine. Regions affected range from Finland and the Baltics to Poland, Romania and Bulgaria — in addition to the Black Sea, the Caucasus and Turkey. The Middle East is also being affected by interference stemming from Israel and Iran’s hostile activities in the region. Other interference efforts, albeit at a lower scale, are also regularly occurring in areas of Pakistan, India and Myanmar.

This interference can cause significant disruptions to airline take-offs and landings, leading to costly flight delays and flight plan changes. It also presents real risks for certain aircraft and airports. For instance, some airports rely solely on GPS signals for their method of approach —– this is why Russian GPS jamming forced Finnair to suspend flights to Estonia’s Tartu Airport earlier this year. In 2019, a passenger aircraft in Idaho nearly crashed into a mountain due to GPS disruption.

The US Armed Forces are working closely to integrate and adapt different missile systems within their inventories.

Most recently, the US Army sand Lockheed Martin launched a Patriot Advanced Capability 3 (PAC-3) missile segment enhancement interceptor from a US Navy (USN) ground-based, containerised Mk70 launcher platform against a cruise missile target mid-flight for the first time.

The MITRE Corporation has revealed that the cyber attack targeting the not-for-profit company towards late December 2023 by exploiting zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) involved the actor creating rogue virtual machines (VMs) within its VMware environment.

“The adversary created their own rogue VMs within the VMware environment, leveraging compromised vCenter Server access,” MITRE researchers Lex Crumpton and Charles Clancy said.

“They wrote and deployed a JSP web shell (BEEFLUSH) under the vCenter Server’s Tomcat server to execute a Python-based tunneling tool, facilitating SSH connections between adversary-created VMs and the ESXi hypervisor infrastructure.”

It’s currently not clear how these bogus websites are distributed, but similar campaigns in the past have employed techniques such as malvertising and search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning.

Stealer malware have increasingly become a common threat, with cybercriminals advertising numerous custom variants with varying levels of complexity. This includes new stealers like Acrid, SamsStealer, ScarletStealer, and Waltuhium Grabber, as well as updates to existing ones such as SYS01stealer (aka Album Stealer or S1deload Stealer).