What would make a 37,500-ton oil tanker disappear off its GPS screen and then reappear, more than 20 miles inland, sitting in the middle of an airport near the Russian port of Novorossiysk on the eastern end of the Black Sea? Or make 20 other large ships have the same problem in the past year? Experts say the answer is “spoofing,” or the result of someone interfering with the GPS system, and they say that Russia is probably behind it.
Here, a great story from CNN shows how spoofing can overpower a GPS with a stream of false data. “It’s clearly deliberate, to make receivers in one location believe that they’re in another location,” says Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation. And spoofing is increasing in Russian waters, with 450 recent reports of GPS screens showing that ships at sea were in Russian airports.
“We are dangerously vulnerable to spoofing,” says Todd Humphreys, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Humphreys should know; four years ago to make that point he put together a team of computer students who moved an $80 million yacht off its course in the Med (with the cooperation of the yacht’s owner).
Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/03/technology/gps-spoofing-russia/index.html
