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Russia accused of massive GPS spoofing campaign

Russia has been conducting a major campaign to experimentally hijack signals sent by Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) systems such as GPS, researchers have claimed in a detailed report.

Technically, GNSS spoofing (as opposed to simpler jamming) is an attempt to send false positional signals to a receiver using global satellite networks such as the US GPS, China’s Beidou, Russia’s GLONASS, and Europe’s Galileo.

In recent years, there have been a flurry of small-scale reports of spoofing plus one major incident in the Black Sea in 2013 when at least 20 ships reported positioning anomalies blamed on the phenomenon.

What the team at the Center for Advanced Defense (C4ADS) has uncovered is the first confirmed example of a nation using this technique on a large scale.

The evidence emerged after the team spent a year crunching satellite data gathered by the International Space Station (ISS), detecting 9,883 suspected spoofing incidents at 10 global locations connected to its military, including Crimea, Syria, and the Russian Federation.