Hobby says GPS vulnerable to attack

The satellite-based Global Positioning System has no backup system and is frighteningly vulnerable to a devastating attack, a scion of the venerable Hobby family told a cybersecurity conference Friday.

GPS is a critical part of 21st-century life, integral in everything from navigation to the timing of traffic lights to aviation and communications. But Paul W. Hobby said attempts to fund a backup system have stalled in Congress.

Some stopgap measures are being developed. Still, he said, a failure of the system could be catastrophic.

Hobby, who is chairman and CEO of Texas Monthly magazine and has a background in investing and helping run telecommunications companies, likened ignoring a cyberthreat to Houston’s decades of not dealing with flooding issues.

“When there is a known risk, you have to confront it,” Hobby said in the opening keynote of the symposium at the University of Houston-Downtown. “If you don’t confront the music, or in our case the water, it will come to face you.”

The GPS system involves 32 satellites orbiting 22,000 miles above Earth. Most people know it as the system that provides location information for mapping and navigation programs, such as Google Maps or Apple Maps.

But GPS also provides other services, such as timing, that are used in a variety of industries.