C4ADS, a Washington-based think tank dedicated to data-driven analysis of conflict and security issues worldwide, has released a report to “expose GPS spoofing in Russia and Syria.”
Used for a variety of civil and military purposes, GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are vulnerable, remind the authors of the report: “By attacking positioning, navigational, and timing (PNT) data through electronic warfare (EW) capabilities, state and non-state actors can cause significant damage to modern militaries, major economies, and everyday consumers alike.”
Thus, “GNSS attacks are emerging as a viable, disruptive strategic threat.”
The C4ADS report focuses on “an emerging subset of EW activity: the ability to mimic, or ‘spoof,’ legitimate GNSS signals in order to manipulate PNT data.” By detecting and analyzing patterns of GNSS spoofing in the Russian Federation, Crimea, and Syria, the US analysts “demonstrate that these activities are much larger in scope, more diverse in geography, and longer in duration than any public reporting suggests to date.”
The report profiles four use cases of current Russian state activity in this field:
- GNSS spoofing events across the entire Russian Federation, its occupied territories and overseas military facilities (9,883 suspected instances from February 2016 to November 2018);
- GNSS spoofing for strategic facilities protection, be it in Moscow or on the coast of the Black Sea;
- GPS spoofing in active Russian combat zones, particularly Syria, for airspace denial purposes;
- GNSS spoofing for VIP protection, with a “close correlation” found between movements of President Putin and GNSS spoofing events.
In particular, the authors noticed that, whenever the Russian president gets close to a harbor, the GPS of the ships moored there go haywire, placing them many miles away on the runways of nearby airports.
The authors also believe that “the most likely placement for a GNSS spoofing transmitter on the Black Sea is at a multi-million dollar ‘palace,’ formerly owned by reported family members of senior security officers and previously reported to be built for President Putin.”
Beyond this particular kind of use, the report concludes that Russia is “growing a comparative advantage in the targeted use and development of GNSS spoofing capabilities to achieve tactical and strategic objectives at home and abroad.”
However, “the low cost, commercial availability, and ease of deployment of these technologies will empower not only states, but also insurgents, terrorists, and criminals in a wide range of destabilizing state-sponsored and non-state illicit networks,” the report warns.
- Download the report or read a summary by Foreign Policy
