this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do::New "spoofing" attacks resulting in total navigation failure have been occurring above the Middle East for months, which is "highly significant" for airline safety.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Pretty sure this is the story, rings true to my memory of the company name starting with "L": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/lightsquared-broadband-a-threat-to-gps/

Although this article doesn't cover how the GPS systems used cheap filtering circuits that didn't adequately filter out adjacent frequencies. This was done purely to save money, because there wasn't anything using the adjacent frequencies. As a result, LightSquared went bankrupt in 2012.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Edited my last comment, I don't think that article goes into much detail. It only really covers the objections by GPS device manufacturers against LightSquared, not the technical aspect ie poor filtering by cheap GPS devices.

This article covers LightSquared's claims of poor filtering by GPS devices: https://www.networkworld.com/article/696602/wireless-lightsquared-says-gps-makers-ignored-filtering-rules.html

This article also covers some of it: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/lightsquared-blew-it-and-heres-why/

TL;DR GPS devices cut corners, however because they were established and so endemic across the industry, there was no practical way to fix them all and LightSquared was sent down the toilet.