GNSS jamming and spoofing
Deliberate disruption of satellite positioning signals, making them unusable or replacing them with a false position, which has become widespread near conflict zones and exposes ships and aircraft to accidents with no identifiable attacker.
Satellite positioning systems emit very weak signals that are easy to disrupt. Jamming consists in drowning them in radio noise, depriving the receiver of any position; spoofing consists in broadcasting credible false signals, making the receiver compute a wrong position without noticing. Long limited to occasional military uses, these phenomena have become widespread since 2022 around the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea and the Middle East, affecting thousands of flights and ships daily. Their authors are rarely named officially, and jamming may be a side effect of protecting military sites against drones. For insurance, the risk is twofold. A spoofed ship that runs aground or enters prohibited waters, an aircraft that loses navigation on approach, produce losses whose cause is state action without being a declared act of war, which reopens the war exclusion question in hull policies. And spoofing also serves the shadow fleet, whose vessels thereby mask their real position, which complicates sanctions screening.
In late April 2024, Finnair suspended its flights to Tartu, Estonia, for more than a month after two aircraft had to abort their approach because of positioning signal jamming, the airport having no approach system independent of satellites. Estonian authorities attributed the interference to Russia.
GPS jamming, GNSS spoofing, GNSS interference
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