The Global Positioning System guides our ships at sea. It’s the centerpiece of the new next-gen air traffic control system. It even timestamps the millions of financial transactions made across the world each and every day.

And it’s at extreme risk from criminals, terrorist organizations and rogue states — and even someone with a rudimentary GPS jammer that can be bought on the Internet for 50 bucks, said Todd Humphreys, an expert on GPS with the University of Texas.

“If you’re a rogue nation, or a terrorist network and you’d like to cause some large scale damage — perhaps not an explosion but more an economic attack against the United States — this is the kind of area that you might see as a soft spot,” he told Fox News.

Humphreys was the keynote speaker at a conference of world experts organized by the UK – ICT Knowledge Transfer Network in London yesterday. His predictions for what lies ahead with this emerging threat were dire.

For example, in 2010, UK researchers aimed a low-level GPS jammer at test ships in the English channel. The results were stunning: Ships that veered off course without the crew’s knowledge. False information passed to other ships about their positions, increasing the likelihood of a collision. The communications systems stopped working, meaning the crew couldn’t contact the Coast Guard. And the emergency service system — used to guide rescuers — completely failed.

Then, there’s the incident with the U.S. drone lost over Iran. Humphreys believes that by using simple jamming technology, Iranian authorities confused the ultra-sophisticated RQ-170 spy drone to the point that it went into landing mode. The drone’s Achilles heel? It had a civilian GPS system — not a military-grade encrypted model. It didn’t take much to blind it and force it down.

Another level of rapidly-emerging threat is so-called “spoofing.” Unlike a jammer, which blocks or scrambles GPS signals, a “spoofer” mimics information coming from a satellite. It can make an aircraft, ship or other GPS-guided device think it’s somewhere that it’s not.

Humphreys says organized crime is already attempting to exploit the possibilities. Gangs could hijack a container truck full of high value goods, and through spoofing, make its owner think it’s on its way to the intended delivery point — instead of to the gang’s warehouse.

“The civil GPS signal’s completely open and vulnerable to a spoofing attack, because they have no authentication and no encryption,” Humpheys told Fox News. “It’s almost trivial to mimic those signals to imitate them and fool a GPS receiver into tracking your signals instead of the authentic ones.”

Hijacking a cargo container is one thing. Spoofing the global financial system is quite another. In his London presentation, Humphreys warned about another emerging GPS threat — the worldwide network of stock and commodity trades.

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