Tehran Suspected To Be Behind Spoofing Attacks On Commercial Flights

Recent electronic interference incidents for commercial flights near Iran have led to "unthinkable" navigational issues that cripple airliners' guidance systems, according to Vice magazine's report.

The GPS signals were “spoofed” in these incidents in order to fool planes into believing they were flying miles away from their actual location.

Reports of these attacks have been appearing since late September when Forbes initially disclosed that an international group of pilots and aviation professionals, Ops Group, was compiling data to be made public.

Over the past five weeks, the Ops Group has tracked more than 50 incidents over the Middle East but also identified a distinct new type.

The group states, that there is currently no solution to this new type of attack "with its potentially disastrous effects and unclear cause.”

While the entities behind the attacks are still unknown, the possible source of this new type of "spoofing" is the eastern periphery of Tehran, according to Todd Humphreys, a University of Texas, Austin, professor who researches satellite communications.

Although milder meddling with airliner navigation systems has been present in the skies over the Middle East and specifically near Syria since 2018, this kind of powerful “spoofing” is new.
"The spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System, a piece of equipment often described as the brain of an aircraft,” the report said.

A Canadian news outlet revealed in 2021 that Iran jammed GPS when it shot down an airliner over Tehran. Iran's Revolutionary Guards shot down a Ukrainian civilian airliner, flight PS752 on January 8, 2020.