Satellite navigation underpins transport, emergency response and public safety, but the signals are vulnerable to natural and human-made interference, the European Space Agency said on 25 August 2026. ESA cited estimates that 10% of European GDP is enabled by satellite navigation, and reported that more than 10 000 ships were affected by malicious interference globally in the second quarter of 2025 — an eightfold increase on the first quarter of 2025. Jamming drowns out signals with stronger ones, spoofing fakes them to mislead receivers, and space weather can also disrupt signals in the ionosphere.

Three activities backed by ESA's Navigation Innovation and Support Programme (NAVISP) aim to monitor and map such interference. ARFIDAAS, developed by Norwegian research centre SINTEF, continuously monitors Galileo, GPS and GLONASS frequencies for near real-time detection. Stations in Amsterdam and Trondheim contributed to research tracing powerful interference events affecting Europe, Greenland and Canada to a Russian military satellite system.

Austrian company Dimetor uses GNSS receivers on mobile telecommunications towers to detect jamming and spoofing, potentially producing country-level maps continuously rather than relying on pilot reports. Swiss startup onocoy is combining artificial intelligence with community-driven monitoring to protect high-accuracy location services; in a first phase it simulated and analysed spoofed data to train the system to distinguish fake from real signals. Further phases to develop and validate detection algorithms are planned.