this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
99 points (100.0% liked)
World News
1998 readers
987 users here now
Rules:
Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.
Other Great Communities:
Rules
Be excellent to each other
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is mostly a nothing burger. AIS has basically zero validation built in. I'm not sure where the article is sourcing its data from, but it's probably an open source ship tracking site.
AIS datagrams aren't encrypted, so you can make one with any ship ID and location data you want, then create a station account on one of the open trackers and inject it.
Alternatively, you could get a cheap SDR dongle and broadcast your spoofed messages to a nearby station and let them upload it. It's been a while since played around with SDR, but you could probably get everything you need for around $200. You'd almost certainly be breaking licensing laws doing this, for what that's worth.
Edited to add: Looks like this article is using kpler.com, where you can sign up to be a receiver station and feed them data.
It's not even that involved. The crew can just type in whatever information they want, probably in a settings page on their chart plotter screen.
True, what I was getting at is that AIS alone doesn't prove that there is even any ship at all.
Oh, yeah, true! Like those Virtual ATONs that are in common use.