AIS - Who said it couldn't be hacked?

[Daverw]

Is it not just a case of adjusting the offset in the settings and then the reported position then moves to suit

 

[st599]

Doubt you'd need an SDR. It's quite a basic FM transmitter.

 

[marklucas]

This stuff is child's play.

I have sat on the Waterloo Station concourse with some potential customers from MI (XY) and turned on a mobile network in a flight box. We had over 100 innocent punters on our network in five minutes - in theory we could have spoofed the network ID and then connected it to the live phone network and listened into every call / read every text / logged every bit of data they sent.

You can buy one for $10,000.

 

[Daverw]

I think we are getting confused with marine traffic and other web based systems that can of course be given false data and live AIS from each vessels VHF AIS signal and picked up directly on another vessels AIS receiver, why would anyone use web based AIS on the water?

 

[Roberto]

I think we are getting confused with marine traffic and other web based systems that can of course be given false data and live AIS from each vessels VHF AIS signal and picked up directly on another vessels AIS receiver, why would anyone use web based AIS on the water?

Those data were received (hence sent) by radio, not directly contributed via internet; false data was sent on ais radio frequencies and would have been received by ship ais receivers near the transmitter.
The difference I can think of is AIS web sites may show one whole day of data (and one has to click over the single coloured dot to see its position report "age"), whereas ship stations usually have a means of automatically marking/filtering data depending on how old is the received signal.
Anyway, no big deal, if there is a message to be taken, I think it is double triple check messages which might have been sent by less scrupolous users.

 

[GHA]

Those data were received (hence sent) by radio, not directly contributed via internet; false data was sent on ais radio frequencies and would have been received by ship ais receivers near the transmitter.

How can you know that? Did you see it on your own ais set onboard?
Marine traffic receives the data over the Internet, all you need is the station number and port number. How can you possibly know that the station owner didn't have a glass of red too many and have a play or someone got hold of their station and port number and have a fiddle.
If it was received by other stations simultaneously it would be a different matter but looks like it was just one station despite several others overlapping the area.
If the only evidence is from a single station on marine traffic then Occams razor points a huge arrow at the simple explanation.