When 970 ships walked into an airport

Within 24 hours of the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran in 2025, over 970 ships per day found their navigation systems reporting impossible positions - vessels appearing on land, at airports, inside nuclear power plants. Commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which carries roughly 20% of the world's oil and gas, ground to a near halt. A tanker collision followed. The tools behind this disruption are open-source, publicly documented, and available for under $500 AUD.

GPS spoofing - the transmission of counterfeit satellite navigation signals - has evolved from a university research curiosity into a routine weapon of state-level electronic warfare. Yet it remains almost entirely absent from mainstream cyber security conversations, despite directly threatening the critical infrastructure that Australian organisations in maritime, aviation, energy, and finance depend on every day.

This session goes deep on how GPS spoofing actually works at the signal level: the RF physics, the open-source tooling, and how state actors scale a technique born in a lab into an operation disrupting hundreds of kilometres of critical shipping lanes. We walk through the full attack chain from jamming to signal takeover, examine real incidents from the Black Sea to the Strait of Hormuz, and break down what detection and defence actually look like in practice.

We then examine where Artificial Intelligence sits in this fight - on both sides. The weapons spoofing is designed to blind are AI-guided. The maritime intelligence platforms that detected and characterised the Hormuz campaign at scale are AI-powered. And the next generation of both attacks and defences will be driven by machine learning - from adaptive coherent spoofing that evades detection, to real-time anomaly detection running directly on receiver hardware.

Transcript

1. Tonee Marqus WHEN 970 SHIPS WALKED INTO AN AIRPORT GPS spoofing, electronic warfare, and the Strait of Hormuz
2. GPS is not Google Maps. Global Positioning System. Built by Bradford Parkinson for the US Air Force. Its real product is timing. POSITION · NAVIGATION · TIMING GNSS: Global Navigation Satellite System. GPS is one. Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou are others. GPS.gov · NIST TN 2189 · Stanford GPS Lab on Bradford Parkinson
3. The GPS everyone recognises. Position answers one question: where am I? Aircraft · Ships · Emergency response · Surveying · Mining · Agriculture · Autonomous systems GPS.gov applications
4. You never see GPS. You see what stops without it. Position and timing sit underneath freight, rideshare, parcels and payments. None of it is labelled GPS. FREIGHT RIDESHARE GLOBAL PARCELS PAYMENTS Australia Post, Toll and Linfox route vehicles and prove delivery against satellite position. Uber, DiDi and DoorDash match a driver to a customer using a coordinate, not an address. Amazon, UPS and FedEx run sorting, scheduling and last-mile tracking on the same signal. Card terminals and settlement systems timestamp every transaction against a shared clock. 31 satellites. Seven billion devices. One signal. GPS.gov · InvestigateTV, Dead Reckoning, 16 Dec 2024 · NAB Broadcast Positioning System briefing
5. A GPS satellite is a flying atomic clock. 31+ satellites at 20,200 km, each with rubidium or caesium clocks accurate to a second in a million years. They broadcast two things only: where they are, and what time it is. GPS space segment, GPS.gov
6. 50 watts leaves the satellite. A whisper lands. The signal weakens with the square of the distance across 20,200 km of empty space. By the time it reaches your antenna, the signal measures around -160 dBW, a fraction of a billionth of a billionth of a watt, weaker than the noise floor of the sky itself. Inverse-square signal loss over the GPS downlink
7. A military ranging system became the world's utility. How GPS's original purpose expanded far beyond its designers' intent. 1 1970s: built for the military The US Department of Defense designed GPS to guide ships, aircraft and weapons, not civilians. 2 1983: a shoot-down forces the issue Korean Air Flight 007 strayed off course and was shot down. The US commits to opening GPS to civil aviation. 3 2000: Selective Availability switched off Civilian signals had been deliberately degraded. Turning that off made everyday GPS ten times more accurate overnight. 4 2000s: a free utility, not a military tool Free civil access let phones, cars, banks and logistics networks build directly on top of GPS. 5 Today: load-bearing infrastructure What began as a positioning aid for the military now carries position and time for most of the modern economy. A ranging system built for the battlefield now underwrites the civilian economy.
8. BUT GPS HAS ANOTHER JOB. TIME.
9. GPS also gives the world a shared clock. Timing is the hidden dependency behind finance, telecoms, power and distributed systems. GPS.gov timing + NIST critical-infrastructure timing dependency research
10. The clock does not start in space. Atomic time is made on the ground, steered up to orbit, then broadcast back down. ON THE GROUND UP TO ORBIT BACK DOWN INTO YOUR RACK Caesium atomic clocks set the reference. In Australia that is UTC(AUS) at NMI Lindfield, Sydney. Ground control steers the atomic clocks aboard each satellite against that reference. Every satellite broadcasts where it is and the exact moment the signal left it. Receivers recover time from that broadcast. Even NMI's remote servers link back by GPS common view. Legal time is defined by law. It is delivered by satellite. National Measurement Act 1960 · NMI time and frequency services · GPS.gov timing
11. Three industries. One dependency. Finance, telecoms and the power grid all need systems that agree on what time it is. FINANCE TELECOM POWER GRID Ordering, traceability and audit logs depend on systems agreeing on time. Precise timing lets cellular infrastructure coordinate and share spectrum. Synchronised measurement tells operators what happened, where, and in what order. GPS.gov timing applications · GPS.gov and financial institutions · NIST timing dependencies
12. The economy stops moving. Not a blackout you can see. A slowdown in everything that has to agree on where and when. $1.6bn 2004 Estimated US cost per day Year a US GPS backup was first directed 0 National backups operating today Aircraft grounded. Responders slowed. Markets shut. All at once. US Space Force General Michael Guetlein put it plainly: the entire economy would come to a halt, because we could not move data, could not move people and could not move goods. Emergency services lose dispatch precision. Aviation falls back to slower procedures and cuts capacity. Banks and markets stop rather than transact on time they cannot trust. Gen Michael Guetlein, US Space Force, via InvestigateTV, 16 Dec 2024 · GPS World, Capitol Hill PNT event, 2025
13. A GPS failure would feel bigger than a telecom outage. Think of a major telco outage as a small taste of infrastructure dependence. Now imagine timing, transport and navigation failing together. 79% of refined petroleum consumption met by imports in 2023-24 Energy.gov.au Australian energy statistics · Australian Defence
14. SO WHAT HAPPENS IF GPS STOPS TELLING THE TRUTH? Not “GPS unavailable.” GPS believable, but wrong.
15. THIS ISN'T HYPOTHETICAL. JUNE 2025
16. 972 ships a day. Measured, not hypothetical. Windward measured an average of 972 affected vessels per day from 15 to 18 June 2025, peaking at 1,155. Windward Maritime AI, 19 Jun 2025, published as “970 ships daily”
17. The ships did not move. Their coordinates did. Windward observed implausible AIS positions around Iran, Oman and Dubai during widespread interference. Windward Maritime AI, 19 Jun 2025 · visual reconstruction based on reported interference zones
18. Then two tankers actually collided. 17 June 2025, at the eastern entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, inside a sustained GNSS interference zone. ~1,000 100 2m Vessels hit by interference, 12 to 15 June Daily Strait transits by 17 June, down from 147 Barrels of crude aboard Front Eagle Investigators called it navigational error. It happened inside a jamming zone. Front Eagle, carrying two million barrels of Iraqi crude, struck the tanker Adalynn 15 nautical miles off Fujairah. Fire on both ships, no injuries, 24 crew evacuated. Days earlier, tracking data had wrongly placed Front Eagle onshore in Iran. Security firms assessed the collision as nonhostile, with interference a suspected factor, not a proven cause. Windward, 18 Jun 2025 · Lloyd's List, 17 Jun 2025 · GPS World · JMIC advisories
19. When GPS lies, crews really do go old-school. This is documented operational fallback, not a thought experiment. Fallback: inertial navigation · radar · VOR / DME / ILS · ATC vectors CNN, 28 Apr 2026 · Reuters on Finnair, 29 Apr 2024 · CASA
20. Jamming is very easy And cheap! Few dollars can buy a real jammer…
21. Eighteen months to find one truck. November 2009: the GPS precision landing aid at Newark Liberty began dropping out every single day. $33 200 mW 18 mths Cost of the jammer Its transmit power To locate one vehicle Not the actual driver A $30 jammer beat a signal from 20,200 km away. Finding it took eighteen months. A driver hiding from his employer's tracking, on the turnpike beside the runway. Nov 2009 Feb 2010 Apr 2011 Landing aid drops out daily FAA and FCC deploy detection gear Source found: one passing truck FAA and FCC record via DHS PNT briefing, Mar 2012 · GPS World, Personal Privacy Jammers · Inside GNSS
22. Jamming attacks availability. Spoofing attacks integrity. Jamming stops the receiver locking on. Spoofing broadcasts counterfeit signals that produce incorrect position, navigation or timing. EASA GNSS interference definitions
23. You attack the signal, not the receiver. This is why the price and quality of your equipment does not protect you. UNDER $100 ABOUT $5,000 10 TO 12 PEOPLE ANY RECEIVER A jammer at that price disrupted a GPS landing aid under test at Newark Liberty in 2012. A spoofing rig costs roughly this much, and build instructions are published online. Enough operators, spread across a country, to mount a large coordinated attack. Cost does not help. Every receiver is listening for the same faint broadcast. The expensive receiver hears the same lie as the cheap one. FCC Notice of Apparent Liability, 1 Aug 2013 · Scientific American, 20 Feb 2024 · ACMA device audit
24. But spoofing is little bit more complex To explain it, we need to go back to December 4, 2011
25. Meet the RQ-170 Sentinel, the Beast of Kandahar. A CIA flying wing coated in classified radar-absorbent material, built to fly surveillance through heavily defended airspace undetected. CIA RQ-170 Sentinel · Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
26. Then, over Iran, it simply vanished. Flying covert recon over nuclear facilities, operators in Nevada lost contact. The assumption: mechanical failure, crashed into a mountain, wreckage scattered across miles of desert. Early speculation on the RQ-170 loss, Dec 2011
27. December 4, 2011: Iran put it on television, intact. No bullet holes. No shrapnel. No surface-to-air missile strike. They captured it without shooting it down. Iranian state television, 4 Dec 2011 · CIA RQ-170 Sentinel
28. One flaw, inherited by everything downstream. Smart bombs, drones, cargo ships and the financial grid all read the same signal. Fool the signal, and every one of them inherits the lie. GPS is one shared node ...and a single point of failure Spoof the satellite signal and every autonomous system reading it inherits the lie, drones included. GPS as shared infrastructure across sectors
29. Distance = speed of light × time delay. The signal left at 12:00:00.000 and arrived at 12:00:00.067. That 0.067s delay × 299,792 km/s puts the drone exactly 20,086 km from the satellite. GPS ranging equation, GPS.gov
30. Four satellites, four timestamps. Each satellite stamps its signal with the exact time it was sent. Four delays become four distances: three fix the receiver's position, and the fourth cancels the receiver's own clock error. Without it, a 1 ms error would put you 300 km off. GPS.gov trilateration overview
31. The drone flew on Einstein being right. For 50 years relativity was theory on paper. GPS turned it into an engineering requirement, and the RQ-170 flew on the answer. 1905 · Special relativity Move fast and time slows for you. The satellites guiding the drone orbit at 14,000 km/h, so their clocks lose 7 µs a day against the ground. 1915 · General relativity Gravity is warped spacetime, and it runs slower deeper in the well. At 20,200 km gravity is a quarter as strong, so those same clocks gain 45 µs a day. Net +38 µs a day. Uncorrected, the drone's own position drifts 11.4 km every day and it misses a target by seven miles. Every fix it flew on was proof Einstein was right. Relativistic corrections to GPS timing, per GPS.gov and NIST
32. Minus 7, plus 45, net plus 38 microseconds a day. Orbiting at 14,000 km/h costs 7 µs. Gravity a quarter as strong as at the surface gains 45 µs. Uncorrected, that drift moves position 11.4 km in one day and 80 km in a week. Two effects, opposite directions Corrected before launch Net: +38 µs/day Special relativity costs 7 microseconds a day. General relativity adds back 45. The net drift is +38 microseconds a day, corrected before the satellite ever launches. Relativistic corrections to GPS timing, per GPS.gov and NIST
33. A small time error could cause inaccurate positioning The +38 microseconds is enough to make the drone receive wrong coordinates Iran's claimed method for capturing RQ-170 Sentinel, Dec 2011
34. How to hijack a drone? feed it a fake set of coordinates. Deny the real signal, capture the receiver with a stronger fake, then steer the position drift slowly enough that the drone corrects toward it without ever noticing. 1. DENY 2. CAPTURE 3. STEER Iran's claimed method for capturing RQ-170 Sentinel, Dec 2011 4. DIVERGING 5. OUTCOME
35. But the Iranians had a serious issue We can now control the directions of the drone, but how can we slow it down? How to slow down the drone so it could land safely? Iran's claimed method for capturing RQ-170 Sentinel, Dec 2011
36. It landed itself, perfectly, on an Iranian runway. Convinced it was hundreds of miles away over friendly territory, the drone flew a textbook approach into the wrong country. Iran's claimed method for capturing RQ-170 Sentinel, Dec 2011
37. Spoofing detection is a consistency problem. One position should not win when the other observables disagree. This is exactly how NIST caught the 2016 anomaly. GNSS spoofing-detection literature · NIST PNT resilience guidance
38. The anti-jam arms race moves between conflicts. CRPA receivers use multiple antenna elements and spatial processing to suppress interference from particular directions. CRPA is the technique. Kometa-M is one Russian implementation. Reuters reported Western scrutiny of possible Russian support to Iran. NovAtel CRPA / anti-jam technical material · Reuters, 22 Jul 2026
39. Galileo can now authenticate navigation messages. OSNMA helps receivers verify Galileo navigation messages. It does not make the signal immune to jamming. EUSPA / GSC, OSNMA operational since 24 Jul 2025
40. AI is becoming both the shield and the risk. The same techniques that detect interference can also help generate it. 1 Detecting spoofing at scale Machine-learning models flag inconsistent AIS and GNSS patterns across thousands of vessels faster than manual review, as Windward's maritime AI already does. 2 Sensor fusion, not blind trust AI blends GPS with inertial, vision and radar data, so a receiver stops trusting one faint signal on its own. 3 Turning interference maps into signal Continent-wide interference tools increasingly use AI to separate genuine jamming from ordinary noise. 4 Autonomous platforms are the new target Drones and self-driving systems lean on AI navigation, which means deceiving the AI is now enough to deceive the vehicle. 5 The double edge The same generative techniques that improve detection can also help attackers craft more convincing fake signals and timing, raising the bar on both sides. AI will not settle this fight. It just raises the stakes for whoever adopts it faster.
41. Is anyone doing enough? Not yet. The warnings are on the public record in both countries. The backup is not. AUSTRALIA UNITED STATES THE WARNING ALREADY POSSIBLE No mandated national PNT backup. SouthPAN augments GNSS but still depends on it. A 2004 presidential directive to build a GPS backup is still unmet twenty ttwo years on. The 29-member US PNT advisory board warned of over-reliance. Its charter lapsed in September 2025. Parkinson says jamresistant receiver techniques exist but are denied to manufacturers. The advice was delivered. The backup was not built. PNT Advisory Board memo, 19 Jul 2024 · Scientific American, 20 Feb 2024 · Geoscience Australia SouthPAN
42. Bringing the clock down to earth. The leading backup proposal does not launch anything. It uses transmitters that already exist. 200 ns 50 ns 3 BPS accuracy target Measured in a live outdoor trial, 2023 US stations already broadcasting it The same tiny timing signal, sent from a television tower instead of orbit. BPS embeds a GPS-grade timing signal inside the ATSC 3.0 digital TV broadcast. No new towers and no new transmitters, just the ones already covering the country. It runs independently of GPS and complements rather than replaces it. A separate cellular proposal exists. Australia has no equivalent programme today. NAB Broadcast Positioning System briefing · InvestigateTV, 16 Dec 2024 · NextNav cellular proposal
43. The urgency is now. GPS is not just navigation. It is national timing infrastructure. It has never fully gone down, so the worst case is untested. In 2016 it stayed up and told the wrong time anyway. There is no single universal backup today. And the signal is easy to jam. The man who built GPS says the backup cannot wait.
44. 970 ships did not sail into an airport. Their systems were given a different reality. What else are we trusting simply because a machine says it is true? Conceptual illustration
45. Contact • Tonee Marqus • toneemarqus@gmail.com • Or let's get connected on LinkedIn