In recent years, the development of jammers has far exceeded people's expectations, and between June 22 and 24, 2017, more than 20 ships operating in the Black Sea were affected by so-called large-scale deception attacks. These ships reported that their GPS navigation had mistakenly placed them at an airport several kilometers from the sea.
A ship sent the following message to the US Coast Guard Navigation Center:
“From near the coast of Novorossiysk, Russia, GPS devices have not been able to obtain GPS signals intermittently. Now it shows HDOP 0.8 accuracy within 100m, but the position given is actually 25 nautical miles. "
Information provided by the captain, including his navigation display photos and paper charts, later confirmed that this interference was indeed an external event, not a single GPS device.
The Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation contacted Windward Ltd., a marine analysis company, to investigate GPS damage in the Black Sea. According to Xiangfeng co-founder Matan Peled (Matan Peled), Xiangfeng experts discovered two more incidents of large-scale GPS jammers in 2017. In each case, marine GPS receivers were tricked into thinking they were in a Russian airport.
“The most interesting thing is that all three sites involve airports - Gelendzhik International Airport and Sochi International Airport near the Black Sea, St. Petersburg Airport near the North Sea. Windward also discovered that some of the ships that appeared in error at Sochi airport were indeed located near Glenzhik, the distance being around 200 kilometers. Even yesterday (September 25), there were still two ships at Sochi airport, 20 kilometers from the actual location of the Sochi seaport. Peled in Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation News Said in the project.
Although there is evidence that Russia is carrying out deceptive attacks (possibly to prevent aerial surveillance via drones), the real cause of the GPS shutdown is still unknown.
“We don't know where all these cell phone jammer are coming from, or the motivation behind them,” Piled said. “From a security perspective, fortunately, they seem to provide obvious misinformation… More subtle errors caused by deception can lead to tragic accidents. "
