The cause of GPS system disturbances observed in Finland and elsewhere in the Baltic Sea region may have been identified. According to several experts, the plant that caused the disturbance is located in Kaliningrad.
Unrest, described as massive, has been observed over a large area since at least 18 December. The intensity of the unrest reached its peak during the Christmas holidays. Around the new year, GPS work was also stopped in Finland and Estonia, writes Iltalehti.
The Polish Agency for Electronic Communications initially suspected that the outage was due to weather conditions. However, John Wiseman, who runs the GPS data-gathering website Gpsjam, stressed that the scale of the disruptions was unprecedented and suggested they were linked to deliberate jamming or military exercises.
An anonymous open source researcher (OSINT researcher) using the pseudonym Markus Jonsson on social media claims to have identified the cause of the outages. Jonsson examined data from flights where GPS problems were reported. The area is first delimited based on the distance at which it is possible to cause disturbance, then evaluated based on the intensity of the sightings.
By combining the data, the account manager was able to pinpoint two or three locations where the disturbances likely originated.
“Kaliningrad, Poland (or Denmark). Choose your suspect,” Jonsson wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
I found that the Baltic Jammer position caused the flights to lose position again.
Kaliningrad, Poland (or Denmark). Choose your suspect.
With a new, larger data set and a more refined method I replicated my results from yesterday.
Data only since the jammer has been active. pic.twitter.com/qH6ikCKSOk
— Markus Jonsson (@auonsson) January 4, 2024
Experts blame Russia
Lieutenant Colonel Joakim Paasikivi of the Swedish National Defense University came to the same conclusion as the open source follower.
In an interview with Swedish national broadcaster SVT, he said Russia has already interfered with the GPS system in Northern Europe to protect the Murmansk region or interfere with NATO exercises.
“I believe this is part of Russia’s attempts to influence and so-called hybrid warfare, so that the situation always remains at a lower level than the conflict. This could be Russia’s way of creating uncertainty and showing strength,” he said . Paasikivi.
SVT also points out that the electronic warfare unit of the Russian Baltic Fleet announced shortly before Christmas that it had organized an exercise for more than a hundred soldiers in Kaliningrad.
Jukka Savolainen, director of the Hybrid Expertise Center, also told Yle that he believes it is very likely that Russia is behind the unrest.
The GPS system is used for navigation and positioning. The interruption of the system, for example, causes problems for air traffic, but does not represent any danger for it. In addition to GPS, aircraft also use other positioning methods based, for example, on accelerometers and fixed points on the ground.
2024-01-05 14:15:00
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