Commercial Flights Are Experiencing ‘Unthinkable’ GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do::New “spoofing” attacks resulting in total navigation failure have been occurring above the Middle East for months, which is “highly significant” for airline safety.
Pretty much this, look up Kalman filters if you want details. The most likely explanation is that they are tuned to effectively trust GPS more than the internal IMU for long periods of time. Really good IMUs are very expensive and still drift but have high speed output. When it works well, GPS is cheap and doesn’t drift but with a slow update rate. The cost optimisation probably means that the IMU data is usually only trusted for a few seconds, probably 10 min at most before it takes whatever the GPS says as truth. If they lost gps signal through jamming, then they would keep navigation on the less certain IMU data, but the GPS sensor thinks all is well so they shift position.
There is probably a software upgrade to the filter that could be used to limit these attacks, but I imagine it’s an active area or research.