Spoofing the ILS [S2Ep24 audio]

Civil aviation has entered a dangerous new era now that Russia has expanded its campaign of sabotage in northern Europe to attack civil aviation directly.

The question we’re going to address in today’s episode is whether those attacks are limited to the planting of incendiary devices on board aircraft, or whether Russia has also started hacking navigational sytems to destroy aircraft and kill flight crew, in particular with the November 25 crash of a DHL 737 freighter in Vilnius, Lithuania.

To be clear, we don’t yet know the answer to this question, but a point I’ve repeated several times in this podcast is that in compromised environment we have to ask the questions before we can find the answers.

To help us understand the issue, we’re joined today by Harshad Sathaye, a cybersecurity researcher who in 2019 published a paper describing an attack which, if carried out, could cause a crash like the one that occurred in Vilnius.