New Type Of GPS Spoofing Attack In China Creates "Crop Circles" Of False Location Data

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31092/new-type-of-gps-spoofing-attack-in-china-creates-crop-circles-of-false-location-data

By Joseph Trevithick
The War Zone
November 18, 2019

A new type of GPS spoofing technology, which may belong to the Chinese 
government, appears to have been impacting shipping in and around China's Port 
of Shanghai for more than a year. Unlike previous examples of spoofing attacks, 
which have typically caused GPS receivers in a certain area to show their 
locations as being at a limited number of fixed false positions, the incidents 
in Shanghai caused the transponders on multiple ships at once to show various 
erroneous positions that forms odd ring-like patterns that some experts have 
dubbed "crop circles."

An article in MIT Technology Review magazine on Nov. 15, 2019, was among the 
first to delve into the data. The information had come from an investigation 
that the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, or C4ADS, a Washington, 
D.C.-based nonprofit, had previously conducted into what has been happening in 
Shanghai. Todd Humphreys, the head of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the 
University of Texas at Austin, an expert in GPS jamming, spoofing, and hacking, 
who had been assisting C4ADS, gave a presentation on the topic at the ION GNSS+ 
satellite navigation conference in Florida in September.

C4ADS has conducted a number of data-driving investigations since 2012, 
including one in July of this year on the smuggling of luxury goods, including 
foreign cars, into North Korea. Another one that the organization published 
four months earlier delved into Russian GPS spoofing and jamming activities in 
Ukraine's Crimea region and the Black Sea, elsewhere in Europe, and Syria.

Russia has been conducting these kinds of attacks for years and they are well 
known at this point. However, instances of spoofing linked to the Russians 
have, typically, caused affected receivers to think that they're all in one 
incorrect location. A series of such attacks in the Black Sea in 2017 notably 
caused numerous ships to register their locations at a single point several 
miles inland.

[...]


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