Three days on from grounding off Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the 7,000 teu MSC Antonia remains stuck in the Red Sea, with vessel tracking showing the ship was likely the victim of GPS jamming.
Analysis from Windward, a maritime analytics firm, has highlighted the spoofing patterns that ended up with the ship aground near the Eliza Shoals west of Jeddah, with vessel tracking from MarineTraffic supporting this theory. GPS jamming in the Red Sea has been commonplace in recent years.
With GPS spoofing on the rise at multiple locations around the world and cyber attacks proving how easy it is to take control of a ship, a report from by Thetius, CyberOwl and HFW, published last year, entitled The Great Disconnect, detailed many recent cyber incidents including how the Stena Impero tanker’s GPS was spoofed to force it to cross into Iranian waters unintentionally in 2019 with the ship and its crew then held for months.
The equipment required for basic GPS attacks costs less than $100, the report warned while adding that with the resources of a nation-state, “a sophisticated spoof on an entire region or sea is not just a possibility, it is a reality”.
Windward’s Q1 2025 report indicated that the average distance vessels “jump” to when their AIS is jammed grew dramatically from 600 km in Q4 2024 to 6,300 km in Q1 2025, representing a significant escalation in jamming capability.
Mediterranean Shipping Co (MSC) has yet to reply to questions sent by Splash yesterday.
The 2009-built MSC Antonia made headlines last August when it lost a number of containers in bad weather while sailing off South Africa.
