Over the past year, GPS spoofing has been causing chaos for the receivers on phone apps in central Moscow to misbehave. Humphreys thinks this is Russia experimenting with a new form of electronic warfare.
“The receiver’s behaviour in the Black Sea incident was much like during the controlled attacks my team conducted,” says Humphreys. In 2013, he showed how a superyacht with state-of-the-art navigation could be lured off-course by GPS spoofing. Todd Humphreys, of the University of Texas at Austin, has been warning of the coming danger of GPS spoofing for many years. “Jamming just causes the receiver to die, spoofing causes the receiver to lie,” says consultant David Last, former president of the UK’s Royal Institute of Navigation. Spoofing is more insidious: a false signal from a ground station simply confuses a satellite receiver. GPS receivers sound an alarm when they lose the signal due to jamming. While this can cause chaos, it is also easy to detect. Until now, the biggest worry for GPS has been it can be jammed by masking the GPS satellite signal with noise. Read more: “I’m alarmed at how much infrastructure is open to online attack”
