Glad I'm not a passenger

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
16,353
“Ram Raiding"
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/brazen-burglars-are-crashing-vehicles-into-stores-04a3ebcf
Brazen Burglars Are Crashing Vehicles Into Stores
West Coast, with more lenient law-enforcement policies, has been hard hit, current and former officials say




The surge in motor-vehicle thefts has been propelled, in part, by more Hyundais and Kias being stolen after social-media challenges were issued last year. Police have said those vehicles typically are used for joy riding or committing other crimes.
While this type of break-in has been around for decades, criminals are increasingly driving into storefronts, rather than the more standard practice of hooking chains onto vehicles to pull out a specific item of value, like a safe, said James Dudley, former San Francisco deputy police chief.
“They’re figuring that if they break through the front doors, they can get away with whatever is of value inside before police can respond,” said Dudley, a lecturer in criminal justice studies at San Francisco State University.

 

Thread Starter

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,788

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
16,353

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
16,353
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7b...kable-gps-attacks-and-nobody-knows-what-to-do
Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do

Commercial air crews are reporting something “unthinkable” in the skies above the Middle East: novel “spoofing” attacks have caused navigation systems to fail in dozens of incidents since September.
In late September, multiple commercial flights near Iran went astray after navigation systems went blind. The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission. Since then, air crews discussing the problem online have said it’s only gotten worse, and experts are racing to establish who is behind it
...
While GPS spoofing is not new, the specific vector of these new attacks was previously “unthinkable,” according to OPSGROUP, which described them as exposing a “fundamental flaw in avionics design.” The spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System, a piece of equipment often described as the “brain” of an aircraft that uses gyroscopes, accelerometers, and other tech to help planes navigate. One expert Motherboard spoke to said this was “highly significant.”
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WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,935
I haven't read the article, but as the snippet points out, GPS spoofing is far from new -- it's widely believed to be how Iran managed to capture one of our drones many years ago.

But what is troubling is the claim that they are corrupting the INS -- if that is happening, that is, indeed, a very poorly designed avionics system. The whole idea is that these are separate systems that can therefore be used to cross-check each other. The only interaction should be limited to read-only actions for the purposes of doing the cross checks.

I wonder if the INS is actually using GPS-derived information (such as a timing reference), or if it is more a case of the two systems being connected to the same communications bus that is then somehow letting someone that infiltrates the GPS being able to piggyback over into the INS.

One possibility, which was a tactic that was being actively researched back when I was doing some peripherally-related work, was to pull off the GPS track slowly enough that the INS system didn't have reason to suspect that anything was wrong. Since INS has drift issues, it needs to be periodically corrected. I wonder if this is the "corruption" that they are talking about -- that the INS data is being lured into correcting itself using the slowly, but maliciously, drifting GPS data.

The good news is that aircraft have a built-in way of combatting GPS spoofing owing to their usual orientation relative to the spoofers. The satellites are "up" and the spoofers are "down" -- so use more directional antennas and only rely on signals that are sufficiently above the horizon. There are some technical challenges involved, but there always are.
 
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