Newsweek reported South Korean officials have accused North Korea of using radio waves to interfere with GPS navigation systems near the border between the two countries.
This apparently occurred just after North Korea fired a short-range missile into the East Sea. South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency referred to this as an act of “defiance against mounting pressure to give up its [North Korea’s] nuclear program.”
The South Korean coast guard reported that about 70 fishing vessels had been forced to turn back after GPS navigation systems were interrupted by jamming.
KBS World reported:
“South Korea has urged for caution in the Seoul metropolitan area and eastern Gangwon Province after it detected a large amount of satellite disruption signals coming from North Korea. Seoul’s Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning on Thursday raised its alert level for such disruption signals by one notch to the second lowest in the four-tier system, presuming that the jamming is an attack on Global Positioning System (GPS) signals.”
“The ministry said it detected interference in the signals at 7:36 p.m. Thursday. About 70 decibels of jammer suppression were detected on Ganghwa Island, located west of Seoul. About 100 decibels were picked up near Hwacheon County in Gangwon Province. Officials said the interference appears to have come from near Mount Geumgang and the city of Haeju in the North. “
“[…] Seoul officials said two planes were affected by the latest interference but did not suffer major problems. GPS disruptions have occurred three times since 2010 and they all appear to have originated in the North.”
North Korean officials in Pyongyang responded to the allegations, saying that they are nothing more than “sheer fabrication”, according to BBC News.
