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Seoul today accused Pyongyang of carrying out “a provocative campaign” of interference with GPS signals, which affected several ships and dozens of civilian planes in South Korea.
“North Korea conducted a provocative GPS jamming campaign from Haeju and Kaesong this Friday and today,” South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.
Ships and dozens of civil planes are suffering “some operational disruptions“, he added. The South Korean army urged caution on South Korean civilian ships and planes moving in the Yellow Sea region, between China and the Korean peninsula.
“We strongly urge North Korea to stop provocations immediately with the GPS and warn her that she will be held responsible for any resulting problems,” he continued.
Interference consists of the transmission of unknown signals that saturate GPS receivers and make them unusable for navigation. South Korea has accused the North of carrying out this type of interference on several occasions in recent years.
Since May, Pyongyang has also sent thousands of balloons filled with trash to South Korea, with some disrupting traffic at Incheon international airport northwest of Seoul, about forty kilometers from North Korea.
The interference comes a few days after Pyongyang tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), described by Kim Jong-un’s regime as the most advanced in the country’s arsenal.
The launch, carried out just hours before the US presidential elections on Tuesday, was North Korea’s first weapons test since it was accused of sending troops to help Russia in the war in Ukraine.
South Korea retaliated on Friday, firing a ballistic missile into the sea, showing “strong determination” to respond to “any North Korean provocation.”
Spoofing attacks in Europe
In March, Russia was accused of being behind a 63-hour marathon attack that targeted civilian planes in Europe.
The attack included 24 hours of interference distributed across some regions of the Sweden, Germany and Polandbefore switching to more focused interference, covering mainly Poland, for 40 hours. According to another analyst, during this period more than 1600 civil aircraft were affected.
Since , in February 2022, Europe has experienced an increase in the number of significant disruptions of GPS systems and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS).
This interference includes satellite and signal jamming, a technique used to make aircraft GPS receivers “think” they are in completely different locations.
Since August last year, almost 50 thousand planes reported interference of GPS on flights over the Baltic, a phenomenon that has particularly intensified in the region around the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
In 2019, an incident report submitted to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System described how GPS jamming led to a passenger jet almost colliding with a mountain in the state of Idaho.
“Someone will end up getting hurt” he says Dana Gowardhead of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, an NGO based in Virginia focused on protecting and strengthening GPS signals.
