The Russians are screwing with the GPS system to send bogus navigation data to thousands of ships

Jim Edwards 6h

On May 15, 2018, under a sunny sky, Russian President Vladimir Putin drove a bright orange truck in a convoy of construction vehicles for the opening of the Kerch Bridge from Russia to Crimea. At 11 miles long, it is now the longest bridge in either Europe or Russia.

As Putin drove across the bridge, something weird happened. The satellite navigation systems in the control rooms of more than 24 ships anchored nearby suddenly started displaying false information about their location. Their GPS systems told their captains they were anchored more than 65 kilometres away — on land, at the Anapa Airport.

This was not a random glitch, according to the Centre for Advanced Defense, a security think tank. It was a deliberate plan to make it difficult for anyone nearby to track or navigate around the presence of Putin, C4AD says.

The Russians have started hacking into the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) on a mass scale in order to confuse thousands of ships and airplanes about where they are, according to a study of false GNSS signals by C4AD.

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The jamming, blocking, or spoofing of GNSS signals by the Russian government is "more indiscriminate and persistent, larger in scope, and more geographically diverse than previous public reporting suggested," according to the Weekly Intelligence Summary from Digital Shadows, a cyber security monitoring service.

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