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North Korea Jams GPS in War Game Retaliation

North Korea Jams GPS in War Game Retaliation: "


North Korea isn’t exactly following through on its threats to go to war if the U.S. and South Koreans held military exercises together. Instead, Pyongyang is apparently resorting to a half-assed campaign of jamming and overloading web
servers.

North Korea is reportedly jamming Global Positioning System (GPS) signals in South Korea, possibly in an attempt to interfere with the U.S.-South Korean annual Key Resolve/Foal Eagle drills, which kicked off on February 28.

GPS jammers work by sending a signal that interferes with the communication between a satellite and GPS receiver. It’s a relatively simple operation, with relatively short-range effects. Thus far, cell phones used by civilians and troops and some military equipment have been put on the fritz by the disruption attempts.

But the juiciest target for the North’s jamming efforts would be the U.S. and South Korean arsenals of GPS-directed bombs.

If it works just right, the GPS jammer can cut off a satellite-guided bomb’s ability to guide itself to target. The bomb simply continues hurtling towards the ground in the direction it was when it lost contact with a satellite.

However, these weapons have other means of guiding themselves in the event of jamming. Take the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), a guidance kit that’s strapped to older, “dumb” bombs to make them more accurate. In addition to GPS, the JDAM kit comes equipped with an Inertial Navigation System (INS), which measures a bomb’s acceleration and uses the information to plot its way to a target. In the event a JDAM’s GPS signal is successfully jammed, it can rely on its INS to guide it, although accuracy is reduced from 5 to 30 meters.

That’s not the only backup for U.S. bombs. “Increasingly you see that there are multi-mode smart munitions that have both GPS and laser guided so that if one is not working, the other can,” says John Pike, a defense and aerospace expert and president of Globalsecurity.org.

Though he’s not familiar with the specific systems used by the North Korea, Pike says other incidents make him think the U.S. might not have much to worry about in this case.

“The jammings that I have been aware of in other instances I would place into the category of ’seriously annoying.’”

North Korea is believed to have both a GPS jamming system imported from Russia and a modified version its been shopping around the Middle East, according to South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo. Russia reportedly sold a GPS jamming system to Iraq on the eve of the second Gulf War. And in case you missed that one, jamming wasn’t much of an issue for U.S. bombs.

But jamming might not be the only info war trick North Korea’s been up to lately.

Last week, at least 29 websites were affected by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which targeted a number of South Korean government, U.S. military and private sector sites. At the moment, the origin of the web traffic flood remains unknown, but North Korea is widely suspected because of its prior history. In June 2009, South Korea intelligence attributed a series of DDoS attacks which targeted a similar portfolio of sites to North Korea.

Photo: Flickr/DOD

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ME HERO DYD