College Students Hijack $80 Million Yacht With GPS Signal Spoofing

colinneagle writes "A team of students at the University of Texas at Austin built and successfully tested a custom GPS spoofing device to remotely redirect an $80 million yacht onto a different route. The project was completed with the permission of the yacht's owners in the Mediterranean Sea this past June. Because the yacht's crew relies entirely on GPS signal for direction, the students were able to lead the yacht onto a different course without the knowledge of anyone on-board. The GPS spoofing device essentially over-powered all other GPS signals using until the spoofed signal was the only one that the yacht followed. The team then used the GPS spoofing device to convince the ship's crew to redirect onto a different route voluntarily. By changing the signal on the spoofing device, the students led the crew to believe that the ship was drifting off-course to the left. In response, the crew steered the ship to the right, thinking that it would get the ship back on course, when it actually brought the ship off the course entirely."

Re:Moral: learn basic seamanship

[Jmc23]

Easy, just visualize it as an area. If you play with numbers enough you realize there are certain properties that can be exploited to get answers quickly to math problems that are intuitive.

Here's a hint. The usa does not have a good education system. They don't teach you how to learn because they don't understand learning. Memorization is always a symptom of not understanding the why of anything. Another hint, other cultures have developed answers to life that are better than what the west has come up with.

Re:dangerous and illegal

[shipofgold]

Perhaps more to the point - You can't trust GPS to get you to your destination. Period. This story demonstrates an active attack on that, but the crew of any vehicle always needs to have a backup plan available at a moment's notice. If you really want to point fingers here, try the ship's navigator who somehow failed to notice that reality didn't match his charts.

The scary bit is whether the navigator even knows how to read charts any more. Or do dead reckoning or celestial navigation.

The transportation industry is relying more and more on technology and less on human knowlege to get from point A to point B. GPS, Airline Autopilots and Instrument Landing Systems, train automation are all making significant in-roads to the point that the humans on board are just blindly trusting it.

I foresee the auto industry going in the same direction. I tease my kids that their kids will not know how to drive a car. Indeed my kids have never looked at a paper map.