The GPS Threat Nobody Sees Coming

The world’s airlines just put a number on a problem most travelers have never heard of.

A staggering 193%.

That’s how much reported GPS spoofing incidents jumped between 2023 and 2025, according to Mark Searle, director of safety for the International Air Transport Association.

He shared the figure last Tuesday at IATA’s World Safety and Operations Conference in Istanbul. Over the same stretch, reported jamming rose 67%.

Spoofing is growing almost three times as fast.

And it’s the far more dangerous of the two.

A Lie That Looks Like the Truth

When GPS is jammed, the signal simply disappears. The pilot sees the warning and switches to backup instruments.

Spoofing is sneakier.

A spoofer broadcasts counterfeit GPS signals that drown out the real ones. The receiver locks on and reports a position that looks perfectly normal. It’s just wrong.

“During a spoofing event, an aircraft can receive positioning information that appears entirely credible but is, in fact, false,” Searle told the conference.

A plane that knows it’s lost will take care. A plane that thinks it knows where it is won’t.

Same goes for a ship.

367,000 Ships, 22 Spoofing Zones

On September 29, researchers at Georgia Tech released the first global study of large-area GPS spoofing at sea.

They tracked more than 367,000 vessels over about 10 weeks and flagged nearly 18,000 episodes of ships doing impossible things: racing along at more than 60 knots, sailing across dry land, veering miles off course…

They found at least 22 zones with strong evidence of large-area spoofing.

One was the Red Sea. Another was the Gulf of Mexico, where nearly 200 vessels jumped position at the same moment on New Year’s Eve 2024.

And the researchers say their count is a “lower bound.” Short attacks and small nudges slipped right past their filters.

The consequences are real.

In May 2025, the 7,000-container ship MSC Antonia ran aground on a shoal south of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Maritime intelligence firms Windward and Pole Star both pointed to falsified position data. The ship was stuck for weeks.

The Georgia Tech team found the same telltale false tracks near Port Sudan five months before the grounding.

Spoofing is also a favorite tool of sanctions dodgers. One Russian tanker carrying oil to China showed up on tracking screens parked inland near Vladivostok.

Last week, Lloyd’s List Intelligence rolled out a new service that checks suspected spoofing against satellite photos, because the fake positions now look “entirely legitimate,” as its research chief put it.

When one of the oldest names in shipping needs a camera in orbit to tell a real ship from a fake one, the problem has gone mainstream.

The Signal Nobody Can Fake

The only navigation signal that can’t be spoofed is the one you never have to receive.

Quantum sensors work that way.

They use individual atoms, trapped and chilled by lasers to a hair above absolute zero, to measure motion, gravity, and time with extraordinary precision.

Everything happens inside the box. There’s no antenna listening for a satellite and nothing for an adversary to imitate.

A vehicle carrying one simply knows where it is.

The catch has always been size. These systems were born on laboratory tables crowded with lasers and optics.

That’s starting to change fast.

A Big Week for the Quantum Compass

On October 6, one small company unveiled a chip-scale optical cavity built with Honeywell Aerospace and UC Santa Barbara.

The cavity is one of the bulkiest, most delicate parts of a quantum sensor. It keeps the lasers stable. It used to be a tabletop instrument.

Now it fits on a chip, fabricated in Honeywell’s photonics foundry with the same kind of semiconductor process that’s used in commercial fabs today.

That means it can be mass-produced.

The companies say it’s a path to shrinking quantum sensors down to hand-held size, for precision navigation and for atomic timing in data centers and cell towers.

Two days later, the same company signed a partnership with Nova Systems, a defense integrator that has worked with Australia’s military for more than 25 years, to bring its quantum technology to the AUKUS alliance.

That’s on top of a quantum clock already tested aboard a Royal Navy uncrewed submarine, quantum motion sensors, and a quantum gravity sensor it’s building for NASA.

This company has been doing work for DARPA for more than a decade.

It holds more than 230 patents, issued and pending.

Second-quarter revenue jumped 157% from a year ago, and management raised its full-year outlook to about $45 million.

It has more than half a billion dollars in cash and securities.

And the Commerce Department has signed a letter of intent to invest up to $100 million in exchange for an equity stake.

Yet the stock has slid this year, even as the news keeps getting better.

Wall Street is still treating it like just another quantum science project.

The airlines, the shipping insurers, and the Pentagon are treating it like the answer to a problem that nearly tripled in two years.

I call this technology the Quantum Compass.

And I’ve put everything I know about the company behind it into my new report.

You can get the full details here.