Terrifying new cyber hack that can bring down passenger planes

A terrifying new hack that has the potential to bring down passenger planes is becoming more widespread, experts warn. 

GPS Spoofing can push planes off their flight paths and confuse the autopilot’s landing feature, causing them to potentially miss the designated tarmac.

Cybersecurity experts have issued a warning about a surge in GPS spoofing attacks that have risen 400 percent since the first quarter of this year.

They are also becoming more common in warzones, with areas like Ukraine, Russia and the Middle East becoming hotspots.

Experts don't yet know the official reason why hackers are now employing GPS spoofing, but it can be used to alter location data and allow them to monitor people's activities and endanger flights.

GPS spoofing attacks raise the potential that flights could crash by installing ransomware that could veer the aircraft off course and send them careening into other aircraft, terrain or the ocean.

The attacks are becoming more common, but experts are still unsure why and a group has been set up to investigate the incidents and determine who is overriding the plane's GPS systems and why.

A newly published report by the cybersecurity company OPS Group revealed that GPS spoofing attacks worldwide skyrocketed from an average of 200 per day from January to March to 900 daily since April.

They reported that spoofing attacks targeted as many as 1,350 flights on some days.

Hackers transmit counterfeit radio signals to the airline’s receiver antennas to override legitimate GPS signals and send false alerts to the plane’s localization systems that are meant to keep the aircraft away from rough terrain.

Pilots have reportedly noticed that one of the first indicators that a hacker has employed GPS spoofing is when the aircraft clock begins to run backward.

‘We think too much about GPS being a source of position, but it's actually a source of time,’ Ken Munro, founder of cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners, said during a presentation at the DEF CON hacking convention in Las Vegas on Saturday.

‘We're starting to see reports of the clocks on board airplanes during spoofing events start to do weird things.’

He later told Reuters that ‘an aircraft operated by a major Western airline had its onboard clocks suddenly sent forward by years, causing the plane to lose access to its digitally encrypted communication systems.’

In April, Finnair was forced to temporarily pause all flights to Tartu in Estonia due to GPS spoofing, which the airline blamed on Russian hackers.

‘Is it going to make a plane crash? No, it's not,’ Munro told Reuters.

‘What it does is it just creates a little confusion. And you run the risk of starting what we call a cascade of events, where something minor happens, something else minor happens, and then something serious happens.’

However, experts reported that there has been an uptick in incidents near war zones - particularly in the Middle East and around Ukraine and Russia.

Stuart Fox, director of flight and technical operations at the International Air Transport Association told The Wall Street Journal in February that the incidents are raising concerns about cybersecurity risks, although they haven’t caused any major safety issues yet.

‘For the longer term, we need to ensure we are involved in the design of future satellite navigation systems. Countering this risk is a priority for the Agency,’ the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said in January.

These issues have still largely remained unaddressed, but a GPS spoofing workgroup consisting of 450 registered participants has been put together to address the problem, OPS Group reported.

The participants include representatives across industry organizations and airlines including United Airlines, American Airlines, Aer Lingus, Turkish Airlines and Alaska Airlines.

NASA, Boeing, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and FlightSafety International are also involved in the workgroup.

A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokesperson told DailyMail.com: 'We have received no reports of GPS spoofing in the National Airspace System,' adding that 'the FAA does not track spoofing and jamming incidents for other regions.'

DailyMail.com has also reached out to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and several airlines for comment.