An American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel—a U.S. military drone—was flying over Iran en route to its Afghanistan base in December when, Iranian military engineers claim, they reconfigured the drone's global-positioning-system coordinates to fool it into landing, intact, on Iranian soil. The U.S. military claims the drone simply malfunctioned.
On Feb. 22, GPS industry experts from around the world gathered in Teddington, U.K., to discuss the system's vulnerabilities. Bob Cockshott, a director at Britain's Intelligent Communications Technology Knowledge Transfer Network and a conference attendee, says "spoofing," or intentionally generating fake GPS signals to redirect the drone, “is within the capabilities of a bright electronics or software grad.”