June 2021: There was tension in the Black Sea near Crimea, Ukraine as Russian authorities claimed to have fired warning shots at the UK Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender; however, the UK Ministry of Defence denies the event ever happening. Automatic Identification System (AIS) tracking logs showed that the HMS Defender traversed the Black Sea and sailed within a few kilometres of a Russian naval base at Sevastopol, but a live web cam feed proved the HMS Defender to be docked at Odessa, Ukraine. The false AIS tracks indicate GPS and AIS spoofing was involved. Dr. Todd Humphreys comments on this, saying "it’s easy to gin up a fake AIS signal purporting to be the Royal Navy’s HMS Defender and broadcast it around the Black Sea with some provocative-looking tracks.“ Humphreys says he has seen AIS fakery before, but never for a warship. He too suggests that the most likely source is Russian disinformation – to sow confusion.
May 2021: Ligado, an American communications company, received approval from the FCC in 2020 to build a terrestrial 5G network which will operate in the spectrum adjacent to GPS. Many worry that Ligado's network will inadvertently jam GPS receivers because the frequencies are near one another and Ligado's signals will be much stronger. Interestingly, the FCC only requires Ligado to pay for accidental damages to federal GPS users. This has sparked a wave of controversy, considering that private companies would also suffer substantial losses if their GPS-dependent systems are disrupted. Read the article from RealClearMarkets here.
May 2021: Reports of maritime GNSS spoofing have become all but routine in recent years. Ships navigating the Strait of Hormuz have been reporting suspicious navigation problems which may be the result of Iranian spoofing. Many theorize that Iran uses spoofing to lead unsuspecting vessels into Iranian waters where they may be captured. This article from The Economist mentions Dr. Humphreys's experiments in GPS spoofing as the first public demonstrations of such technology.