GPS

A February 2013 investigation by the Los Angeles Times showed that “thousands” of high-risk sex offenders and parolees were routinely removing or disabling their GPS tracking devices. And these individuals have little risk of being caught because California's jails are apparently too full to hold them.

Researchers have developed three attacks capable of crippling Global Positioning System infrastructure critical to the navigation of a host of military and civilian technologies including planes, ships and unnamed drones.

The scenarios developed include novel remote attacks via malicious GPS broadcasts against consumer- and professional-grade receivers which could be launched using $2500 worth of equipment.

Weaknesses in the technology that allows smartphone users to pinpoint themselves on a map, or check into restaurants and bars using apps such as Foursquare, could allow those users to be tracked remotely.

Ralf-Philipp Weimann, a researcher at the University of Luxembourg, reported this finding at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas yesterday. He believes that the complex mechanism by which phones get location fixes likely also hides vulnerabilities that could allow the mechanism to be used to install and run malicious code on the device.