Yemen Monitor/Newsroom:
Tore Morten Olsen, President of Maritime at Marlink, has issued an urgent warning to vessels transiting high-risk areas, confirming that Houthi cyber-attacks in the Red Sea have evolved to include GPS signal spoofing. This manipulation leads to a loss of control over position, navigation, and timing.
Olsen noted that the implications extend beyond merely misleading ships. Some vessels are now appearing on tracking systems at supersonic speeds or suddenly anchoring on land, while others are placed in phantom circles around supposedly protected targets. This highlights the extent of data manipulation originating from satellites.
Marlink clarified that the electronic interference is not limited to GPS but also affects mandatory safety services within the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS). This puts vessels at risk of losing the ability to send distress calls in emergencies. This situation led the company’s assistance centers to receive over 150 reports in a single day in mid-July 2025, compared to just one call every two weeks in July 2024.
To counter this, the Center of Excellence at Eik Teleport is providing temporary manual solutions for navigators. Meanwhile, the Maritime Engineering-CTA team is working to produce systems that increase the resilience of GNSS communications. This effort considers that most satellite signals are weak when they reach ships, making them easy to intercept with small, land-based devices.
The company emphasized that even modern LEO satellites like Starlink rely on GPS for positioning and timing, a dependency also shared by Inmarsat-C, which carries GMDSS signals. This makes relying on a single system vulnerable to failure.
Marlink recommended that ship crews compare GPS readings with other systems such as BeiDou, GLONASS, and Galileo. They stressed the importance of not completely shutting down systems when manipulation is suspected, as a spoofed signal already means the system is compromised, and the alleged location is typically within a closed geographical area where real signals are not received.
The company added that satellite antennas will automatically search for the strongest signal within the navigation range, which could lead to an incorrect position being relayed if the signal source is not verified.
Marlink is currently developing new mechanisms that will allow for analyzing the signal source to determine if it is coming from space or from ground-based devices. This will help crews make faster and more accurate decisions to avoid risks.
