The Dangers of Relying too Heavily on Helm Electronics, by Capt. Bill Pike (continued)
TED-Talkin’ Texan
Goward’s point of view gets some backup from one of the most high-profile authorities on GPS spoofing in the world today, Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas at Austin, the guy who impressed the world in 2013 by spoofing the GPS plotters on the very large, very expensive aforementioned megayacht and then, some months later, at the behest of officials at the Department of Homeland Security, demonstrating exactly how he’d done it during an event at White Sands Missile Range.
When I telephoned Humphreys, he was in the midst of a travel schedule that features TED talks, congressional testimony, and TV interviews, but he did take the time to acknowledge the plausibility of Goward’s GPS spoofing theory and also suggest that the Persian Gulf is an especially likely spot for high-tech, GPS-related shenanigans to occur.
“The waters around the Strait of Hormuz,” he said, “fraught as they are with invisible high-stakes boundaries, are just the setting where you might expect a maritime spoofing attack to be carried out.”
