Russia Is Tricking #GPS to Protect Putin – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/03/russia-is-tricking-gps-to-protect-putin
Researchers at a Washington-based think tank have noticed that a funny thing happens whenever Russian President Vladimir Putin 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.
According to a new report by security experts with the group C4ADS, the phenomenon suggests that Putin travels with a mobile GPS spoofing device and, more broadly, that Russia is manipulating global navigation systems on a scale far greater than previously understood.
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The Russian emphasis on electronic warfare extends to Putin’s personal security detail, which has embraced GPS spoofing as a way to protect the Russian leader against drone attacks. But the use of that spoofing technology can also be tracked and provides an unprecedented look at the effectiveness and scale of Russian electronic warfare capabilities.
Putin’s bodyguards are using what on its face is a counterintuitive approach to prevent assassination attempts by drone. The GPS spoofer that travels with Putin impersonates civilian GPS signals and provides the receiver with false coordinates for local airports. It chooses the coordinates of local airports because commercial drones typically come preprogrammed with safety mechanisms that make them automatically land or shut down when they enter the airspace of an airport.
In theory, drones operating near Putin will shut down or automatically land when they come within range of the spoofer. Fear of assassination by drone is a realistic one: Last year, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro survived an attempt on his life that involved using drones to target him with explosives.
But Russia’s use of spoofing technology is having some surprising side effects. In September 2016, Putin traveled to the Kerch Strait along with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to inspect progress on a $4 billion bridge to the Russian mainland and meet with workers. While the two Russian leaders were there, the automatic identification systems of nearby ships—systems that rely in part on GPS—started reporting their locations as the Simferopol Airport about 125 miles away.
Two years later, Putin returned to Kerch to lead a convoy of construction vehicles across the newly constructed bridge. Again, ships in the area reported strange location information, showing up at the Anapa Airport in mainland Russia.