14 DAY TRIAL // The experiment took place off the southern coast of Italy in June, this year, by the University of Texas at Austin and aimed to determine the difficulty of carrying out a spoofing attack at sea.
Relying on a custom GPS spoofing device, a radio navigation research team from the Cockrell School's Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics (University of Texas) ran the experiment on an $80 million super-yacht.
The test started by feeding the navigation system a fake, and initially very faint, GPS signal. The power of the signal was increased gradually until the yacht relied on it completely and ignored the real data from the satellites.
As related in the video above, no alarms were set off and the vessel and the crew trusted the fake GPS data completely, thus allowing the attacker full control over the ship’s course.