News / MSC Antonia, a casualty of the epidemic of GPS area-denial

As one of the most common forms of cyber-interference, ships have had to contend with ‘GPS spoofing’ for more than a decade. But if expert analyses are correct, the 85,760 dwt  MSC Antonia, which went aground in the Red Sea en route to Jeddah over the weekend, may be one of its first casualties.

The vessel was far off-course and perilously close to the Yemeni shore when it grounded, prompting speculation that GPS spoofing was to blame.

Cyber-interference has been a fact of life in the Red Sea since soon after the war between Israel and Palestine began. Vessels have turned off their AIS before transiting the region in attempt to evade Houthi missiles; meanwhile, disguised Revolutionary Guard vessels took up position in the Bab Al-Mandeb strait to spot targets for Iran’s Yemeni proxy.

Analyst WindwardAI suggests that the MSC Antonia may not have been a specific target of ‘threat actors’, but rather a “part of a wider trend in the Red Sea”, with around 180 vessels affected in the first quarter of this year.

There has been a “significant escalation” of jamming capability, Windward said. “The average distance vessels ‘jump’ to when their AIS is jammed grew dramatically, from 600km in Q4 24 to 6,300km in Q1 25,” said Ami Daniel, Windward CEO, this week.

The equipment required to conduct a GPS spoofing attack is widely available and easy to obtain, and the reasons for an attack are just as myriad, making the motives hard to guess at.

“A couple of years back you had one with the Swedish Navy apparently all going out into the Baltic Sea at once – that was just someone manipulating the AIS signals,” one expert, Norma Cyber CTO Øyvind Berget, told The Loadstar recently. “We have see GPS jamming increase enormously, recently mostly in the Eastern Mediterranean and North of Libya, sometimes in the Black Sea.”

Some attacks are not specific to shipping, he added.. “Since the Russia-Ukraine war, we see non-stop jamming [in the Black Sea]… that was because of the drones.”

This makes these waters a very unsafe place to be. Around 50% of ship casualties are caused by navigational errors. But vessel crews have various means of verifying their whereabouts.

Meanwhile, there are several technological alternatives under development. LIDAR and optical navigation, using enhanced camera imaging, are both touted as the means by which crew-less remote-controlled vessels will soon the ply the waters. And the military and aerospace sectors are working on celestial-aided navigation, a modernised version of looking at the stars in the night sky. The result, according to Honeywell Aerospace, is “…a passive, un-jammable solution with GPS-like accuracy in GPS-denied or spoofed conditions, capable of an accuracy of 30m.”

MSC Antonia will probably not be the last case of a vessel led to ruin by a hacked GPS signal; but, as Svein Ringbakken, CEO of DNK War Risk Association, pointed out, increased involvement from shore has benefits as well as drawbacks.

“In the old days, you could sail out and you could kind of hide by turning off your AIS. I think that will be harder and harder, because there are more eyes that are watching both state, government and private. I think it’s a good thing, because if you hide, that’s usually because you’re involved in it.”