The expanding interference has exposed the vulnerability of GPS and the ocean-going shipping that relies on it, an industry that carries more than 80% of global trade, according to the International Maritime Organization, a UN regulator. One night in September 2019, a cargo ship carrying 5,000 tons of ethanol sailing in the Cyprus Strait suddenly issued an emergency distress call, and the captain reported that the GPS signal suddenly disappeared and could not continue to sail in the dark.
Stelios Christoforou, the pilot on duty, immediately realized the seriousness of the problem. During the day, experienced captains can use paper maps, markers and coastlines as references to navigate. But at night, GPS becomes an important tool in unfamiliar waters, especially near Cyprus, where NATO and Russian warships roam. An accident would be catastrophic for the captain of this ship carrying 5,000 tons of dangerous goods. cell phone jammer
In Cyprus, the abnormality of the global positioning system has become commonplace: GPS signals have been unreliable for most of the past two years. GPS jamming has turned this tiny Mediterranean country into a global celebrity.
Worse, GPS problems aren’t limited to the Cyprus Strait.
Over the past four years, GPS disruptions have become increasingly common around the world. In some hot spots:
February 2016: Black Sea ports
Hundreds of ships reported that their GPS positions suddenly drifted dozens of miles inland. A subsequent report by U.S. researchers linked many of the incidents to visits by Putin and other senior Russian officials to Russia’s Crimea
March-April 2016: South Korea
A six-day outage near the North Korean border affected more than 1,000 planes and 700 ships.
Late 2017-Present: Suez Canal
Permanent GPS disruptions plague Egypt’s shipping artery. Potential causes include an insurgency in the nearby Sinai Peninsula and illegal fishing.
Fall 2017 and 2018: Russia-Nordic border
Finnish and Norwegian authorities complained that GPS signals were jammed and spoofed during NATO military exercises in the region bordering Russia. Russian officials denied responsibility.
January 2018-September 2019: Cyprus and the “Eastern Mediterranean”
Sporadic blackouts in the eastern Mediterranean, concentrated around Cyprus and near Lebanon and Israel. Cypriot and U.S. investigators linked the disruptions to military activity in Syria.
June-July 2019: Israel
Pilots taking off and landing at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport reported jamming for weeks. Israeli officials publicly pointed the finger at Russia.
In recent years, GPS has become so reliable and ubiquitous that it has been overlooked. It has proven remarkably easy to disrupt the system. And the shipping industry seems ill-prepared and powerless to change. Rick Hamilton, head of the GPS Information Analysis Team at the U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center, said the shipping industry and governments face a realistic question: “How much risk are you willing to take to avoid spending a lot of money?”
The Global Positioning System began as a military project of the Pentagon. In the 1990s, it was opened to civilian use, and in 2000, the U.S. government stopped degrading civilian signals, making GPS more powerful and reliable and accelerating its adoption around the world.
Russia, China and the European Union are all building their own similar systems. But GPS’s biggest advantage is its wide coverage: a network of at least 24 live satellites around the world means that at any given moment, there are at least four satellites anywhere, allowing receivers to triangulate a user’s exact location. Today, GPS is deeply embedded in daily life. In business: widely used in transportation, agriculture, mining and oil drilling, and every technological upgrade relies on GPS.
But as GPS becomes commonplace, the risks associated with losing it are also increasing. The United States loses $1 billion a day for every 30 days of GPS outages. The marine industry will be one of the hardest hit as the outage will create bottlenecks in ports and waterways. The losses in the United States account for only a small part of the global impact.
Like other signal jamming, GPS jamming is divided into two categories: jamming and spoofing. Jamming includes narrowband jamming (aiming) and wideband jamming (blocking), and there are continuous jamming and pulse jamming in terms of jamming time. The advantage of jamming is that the technical difficulty is relatively low, but the jamming power required is relatively high. Spoofing is to transmit jamming signals similar to GPS signals to mislead GPS receivers away from accurate navigation and positioning. The advantages of this type of jamming are obvious, the jamming power required is small, and the jamming effect is much better than jamming. Of course, the technical difficulty of spoofing is much greater than jamming.
Jamming (Jamming) is to transmit high-power radio signals (usually the transmitter is closer to the receiving source than the satellite) so that the jamming signal covers or destroys the GPS satellite signal. Spoofing (Spoofing) is to simulate the signals of several satellites by transmitting spoofing signals. If the signal is strong enough, the system can make calculation errors.
It may not take a special attack to completely offline GPS. In fact, all satellite navigation systems are vulnerable. As they travel from orbit to Earth, their signals weaken, often accidentally interrupted by atmospheric disturbances or malfunctioning equipment. So, disruptions can be caused by transmitting conflicting signals, a technique called “jamming.” Generally, the stronger the conflicting signal, the farther the disruption covers. More complex and malicious is “spoofing,” which generates false signals to deceive the receiver, such as telling the wrong location of an oil tanker and directing it off course.
