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Geolocation and drone warfare: reasons for crashes on Ukrainian phones during alarms

Recently, Ukrainians have begun to notice that they are not in Kyiv, Dnipro, Sumy, or Vinnytsia, for example, but in Bryansk, Kursk, or Gomel. At best, they are “transported” to another region. The time on the clock also changes depending on the time zone of the “new location”. There are many such cases. Communications and military officials reassure us that this is due to the operation of electronic warfare (EW) systems that counteract UAVs. This usually happens during an air raid. The main thing is not to panic. The reasons for failures on Ukrainians’ phones during alarms were analyzed by [Kommersant]

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported that in order to increase the effectiveness of influence on the enemy, means of spoofing GPS satellite navigation coordinates are used. A side effect of this influence is a disruption in the precise time system used by mobile phones in the automatic time adjustment mode.

“In view of this, it is advisable to turn off the automatic time update mode on your phone and take into account that the accuracy of satellite navigation systems may be disrupted during air alerts,” explained electronic warfare experts at the General Staff.

For the sake of understanding, spoofing is an artificially created situation in which one program successfully disguises itself as another by falsifying data, which allows for an illegal advantage. In practice, spoofing works with the help of special electronics that suppresses the signal of GPS (or GLONASS) satellite systems and replaces this signal with its own. As a result, the drone automatically continues to navigate the global navigation system, but it is controlled by a false signal owned by another operator, as military radio engineers explain the situation.

Simply put, the military is trying to intercept the signal and send the drone that flew into Ukraine back to where it came from. And since modern smartphones also rely heavily on geolocation services to determine the time zone, this can lead to automatic time switching during GPS spoofing, experts say.

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Neither here nor there without GPS

It is worth noting that geolocation is required for a significant part of smartphone services. For example, you can’t launch maps or call certain taxi or delivery services without GPS. This is an indispensable thing if you need to get to a specific place and you don’t know your way around a new location or don’t remember the new name after renaming the street you need.

Surprisingly enough, however, iPhone owners are the ones who complain most often about location changes and time changes. Android users, except in rare cases, are less likely to face this problem. Moreover, Android has more features for changing GPS settings.

“On Android, you can turn on GPS with one click on the option that automatically appears on the screen – ‘allow GPS application to use only this time’. If you unload the app from the memory, the permission disappears and GPS is turned off,” says "Komersant Ukrainian" communications engineer Vladimir Vasilkov.

If anyone is complaining about mobile operators, they have nothing to do with this situation.

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“The phone does not use a mobile network for GPS positioning, so operators have no tools to influence this issue,” Vodafone Ukraine spokeswoman Victoria Pavlovska commented on the problem .

How to fix the time and geolocation failure

If the time and location have already changed, it’s easy to fix.

On iPhone:

• Go to Settings.
• Select “General” and “Date and time”.
• Turn off the “Set automatically” option and manually select your time zone.

On Android smartphones:

• Go to Settings.
• Select “General management” and “Date and time”.

The settings may vary slightly depending on the manufacturer. On Samsung smartphones, you need to leave the “Automatic time zone” option on, but turn off “Time zone by location”. The same goes for Motorola phones. Everything you need is listed in the Date and Time menu. By changing these settings, you can avoid problems with automatic time shifting when your smartphone is running with GPS spoofing activated.

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Author: Alla Dunina

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