{"id":76462,"date":"2018-03-02T14:22:38","date_gmt":"2018-03-02T22:22:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/gps-isnt-very-secure-heres-why-we-need-a-backup"},"modified":"2018-03-06T15:07:03","modified_gmt":"2018-03-06T23:07:03","slug":"gps-isnt-very-secure-heres-why-we-need-a-backup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/gps-isnt-very-secure-heres-why-we-need-a-backup","title":{"rendered":"GPS Isn\u2019t Very Secure. Here\u2019s Why We Need A Backup"},"content":{"rendered":"

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That\u2019s not a lot to you. If your watch is off by 13.7 microseconds, you\u2019ll make it to your important meeting just fine. But it wasn\u2019t so nice<\/a> for the first-responders in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Louisiana, whose GPS devices wouldn\u2019t lock with satellites. Nor for the FAA ground transceivers that got fault reports. Nor the Spanish digital TV networks that had receiver issues. Nor the BBC digital radio listeners, whose British broadcast got disrupted. It caused about 12 hours of problems\u2014none too huge, all annoying. But it was a solid case study for what can happen when GPS messes up.<\/p>\n

The 24 satellites that keep GPS services running in the US aren\u2019t especially secure; they\u2019re vulnerable to screw-ups, or attacks of the cyber or corporeal kind. And as more countries get closer to having their own fully functional GPS networks, the threat to our own increases<\/a>. Plus, GPS satellites don\u2019t just enable location and navigation services: They also give ultra-accurate timing measurements to utility grid operators, stock exchanges, data centers, and cell networks. To mess them up is to mess those up. So private companies and the military are coming to terms with the consequences of a malfunction\u2014and they\u2019re working on backups.<\/p>\n

The 2016 event was an accidental glitch with an easily identifiable cause\u2014an oops<\/em>. Harder to deal with are the gotchas<\/em>. Jamming and spoofing, on a small scale, are both pretty cheap and easy. You can find YouTube videos of mischievous boys jamming drones, and when Pokemon GO users wanted to stay in their parents\u2019 basements, they sent their own phones fake signals saying they were at the Paris mall<\/a>. Which means countries, and organized hacking groups, definitely<\/em> can mess with things on a larger scale. Someone can jam a GPS signal, blocking, say, a ship from receiving information from satellites. Or they can spoof a signal, sending a broadcast that looks like a legit hello<\/em> from a GPS satellite but is actually a haha<\/em> from the hacker next-door.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That\u2019s not a lot to you. If your watch is off by 13.7 microseconds, you\u2019ll make it to your important meeting just fine. But it wasn\u2019t so nice for the first-responders in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Louisiana, whose GPS devices wouldn\u2019t lock with satellites. Nor for the FAA ground transceivers that got fault reports. Nor [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,1488,9,1512,2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-drones","category-military","category-mobile-phones","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76462"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76625,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76462\/revisions\/76625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}