Vessel-tracking system vulnerable to denial-of-service, other attacks, researchers say

Inexpensive equipment can be used to disrupt vessel-tracking systems and important communications between ships and port authorities, according to two security researchers.

During the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam Thursday, Marco Balduzzi, a senior research scientist at Trend Micro, and independent security researcher Alessandro Pasta described three new attacks against the Automatic Identification System (AIS), which is used by over 400,000 ships worldwide.