BY JOSEPH TREVITHICK
Aloss of GPS coverage in Norway and an outage in cellular and emergency cellular services in Latvia, both are part of a growing and worrying trend of reported electronic warfare, as well as cyber attacks, in and around NATO member states in Europe. The incidents both occurred during the largest Russian military exercises in years, suggesting that the Kremlin may have used these drills to more actively demonstrate its expanding hybrid warfighting techniques, all of which offer ways to harass the alliance and other countries with relatively little risk of setting off an actual conflict.
On Aug. 30, 2017, Latvia experienced a major cellular network outage in the western portion of the country, which sits along the Baltic Sea. Another incident, where the country’s 112 emergency telephone hotline, equivalent to America’s 911, was out for approximately 16 hours, occurred on Sept. 13, 2017. In between, on Sept. 7, 2017, commercial aircraft flying over Norway’s East Finnmark district reported a complete loss of GPS signal over a prolonged period.“Our authorities are analyzing a pattern of communications disruption that appears to have originated during the Zapad exercise,” Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said in October 2017, adding that the country’s intelligence services were investigating the apparent electronic attacks, according to The Washington Post. “This was a demonstration of muscle. This was not defensive but offensive.
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/15194/russia-jammed-phones-and-gps-in-northern-europe-during-massive-military-drills
