GPS spoofing and jamming: What the Gulf reveals about the scale of the problem

The military operations that began in the Persian Gulf in February 2026 quickly became a large-scale, real-world demonstration of a problem the positioning industry has been warning about for years. Civilian satellite navigation is structurally vulnerable to GPS (GNSS) interference, and the consequences extend well beyond the vessels or aircraft directly affected.

What happened

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel reportedly launched coordinated military operations against Iran. Within hours, the electromagnetic environment across the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and parts of the Eastern Mediterranean transformed into the most contested radio frequency domain in history. Widespread GPS jamming affected more than 1,100 ships in the Middle East Gulf within the first 24 hours, erroneously placing vessels at airports, a nuclear power plant, and on land. By mid-March, Orca AI calculated that GPS and AIS interference had disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,650 commercial vessels across the Gulf. The disruption has not been limited to maritime traffic—reports indicate that aircraft operating in the region have also experienced GPS interference, highlighting the growing risk to aviation in contested electromagnetic environments. What the Gulf demonstrated is not a new vulnerability, but the scale at which it can manifest in modern conflict.

How GNSS spoofing and jamming works

The vulnerability at the heart of this crisis is not new. GNSS satellites orbit at approximately 20,000 kilometres. By the time their signals reach the Earth’s surface, they are extraordinarily faint. Commercial receivers must be hypersensitive to detect them — and that hypersensitivity is precisely what makes them vulnerable to interference.

Jamming is a brute-force denial of service: high-power noise on the GNSS frequency band overwhelms the real signals. The receiver loses its fix. The crew or system typically knows something is wrong.

Spoofing is more technically involved and more operationally dangerous. Spoofing involves the broadcasting of fake signals designed to force a GNSS receiver into calculating an incorrect position, velocity, and time. Because the civilian L1 C/A signal (the one that virtually every commercial maritime vessel and aircraft relies on) is unencrypted, receivers have no way to verify that a signal is genuine. The result is not a recognisable outage. It is a silent corruption of position data. The receiver shows a plausible fix. The crew trusts the display. The calculated location is wrong.

In aviation, the effects of spoofing are more technically complex than a simple loss of signal. Spoofed GPS data can corrupt an aircraft’s Inertial Navigation System, causing it to continue calculating an incorrect position even after leaving the area of spoofing.

The impacted GNSS-derived position can become systematically biased over wide areas, not only momentarily lost. AIS tracks based on those positions may show vessels apparently transiting over land, clustered around inland targets, or moving in circular or jagged patterns.

Some operators respond by switching AIS off altogether, which protects them from potential spoofing but also reduces visibility for collision avoidance and traffic management.

Intentional GNSS interference is not a new problem

The Gulf is an acute example of a trend that has been building for several years. Interference has been a major issue for shipping and aircraft since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when drones were widely deployed in combat for the first time. The problem is now described as “endemic” in certain regions near conflict, including the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, and parts of the Middle East.

In Q2 2025, more than 10,000 vessels were officially reported as affected by GNSS interference — an eightfold increase compared with the previous quarter. In June 2025, electronic interference with navigation systems was thought to be a factor in the collision between two oil tankers, Adalynn and Front Eagle, off the coast of the UAE.

In January 2026, the Royal Institute of Navigation published a major report, Impacts of GNSS Interference on Maritime Safety, drawing on surveys of more than 100 sector experts and 300 vessel captains. The RIN working group assessed that the impact of GNSS interference on maritime safety, vessel operations, and port security is very serious, with 75% of survey respondents of the opinion that the situation is not improving.

The report found that on a modern maritime vessel, there can be over 20 systems across seven categories that process GNSS data or timing — with fewer than half of those systems directly involved in the navigation of the vessel. Fire safety systems, engine monitoring, environmental compliance reporting, distress systems: all of these can be impacted by spoofing..

The vulnerability is structural. The signals are weak by the time they arrive. The civilian standard is unencrypted. And the problem has compounded as GNSS has become embedded in systems far beyond navigation: power grid synchronisation, financial market timestamping, telecommunications – all of which depend on the timing dimension of satellite positioning as well as the positional one.

The US Maritime Administration’s current advisory for the Strait of Hormuz, Persian Gulf, and Gulf of Oman directs mariners to increase reliance on traditional navigation methods such as radar ranges and visual bearings — which is sound practical guidance, but reflects the absence of a systemic fix at the receiver level.

Building resilience to spoofing and jamming attacks

The core problem is that civilian GNSS signals have no built-in way to prove they are genuine. Addressing that does not mean launching new satellites, it means building receivers that are better at spotting when something is wrong with the signals they are receiving. That kind of detection is technically possible. Galileo, Europe’s satellite navigation system, has already added a signal authentication feature. But the challenge is that ships, aircraft, and critical infrastructure are running millions of receivers that are already installed and not going to be swapped out. Any practical solution has to work within existing hardware: delivered as software, at the chipset level.

The question facing the positioning industry is no longer whether to invest in GNSS resilience. The Gulf has answered that. The question is how quickly the ecosystem can move.

This is the problem FocalPoint has been working on for the past decade. We are actively developing anti-spoofing capabilities built using our patented Supercorrelation® technology. We have published initial results from Jammertest in Norway, demonstrating how Supercorrelation® responds to real-world interference.

We will share more on this work in the coming weeks. If you are a chipset manufacturer, OEM, or government agency working on this problem, we would welcome conversation. Contact us here.