Even though both the DEFCON and BlackHat are behind us hackers across the globe are still looking to show off their new tricks. In a recent announcement Todd Humphrey’s and his group at the University of Texas detailed their experiment to hack the GPS system of the $80M White Rose yacht.
Using “the world’s first openly acknowledged GPS spoofing device” Humphreys and his team reoriented the course of the White Rose remotely, sending the ship off course. According to Humphrey’s team “Unlike GPS signal blocking or jamming, spoofing triggers no alarms on the ship’s navigation equipment. To the ship’s GPS devices, the team’s false signals were indistinguishable from authentic signals, allowing the spoofing attack to happen covertly.”
For Humphreys the implications of his teams work are obvious. “With 90 percent of the world’s freight moving across the seas and a great deal of the world’s human transportation going across the skies, we have to gain a better understanding of the broader implications of GPS spoofing”.
We couldn’t agree more. Watch an animation detailing the hack:
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Images and Video Courtesy of the University of Texas