🇨🇳🇮🇱China turns civilian flight data into tool for tracking Israeli electronic warfare

Chinese military researchers have developed a low-cost method to pinpoint suspected electronic warfare units without resorting to specialized surveillance equipment, reports SCMP.

♦️ a team from the PLA’s Information Engineering University analyzed 43 days of civil aviation data from February 27 to April 10 - covering the period surrounding the US-Israeli war unleashed on Iran.

♦️ GPS spoofing manipulates navigation signals to make aircraft or drones report false positions – yet its effects can show up in flight-tracking records as sudden jumps that defy normal flight patterns

♦️ an algorithm was used to filter out anomalies and estimate where the interference originated

♦️ two suspected sources in the Mediterranean near Israel were identified with estimated positioning errors of 10.9–18.9 km

♦️ one area was roughly 80 km northwest of Haifa; another was about 30 km northwest of the Gaza Strip

The researchers assessed that the first source may have been countering long-range Iranian Shahed-136 drones, requiring sophisticated, dynamic spoofing.

👉 The second may have targeted shorter-range drones like those reportedly used by Palestinian armed groups and Yemen’s Houthi movement.

The researchers claim future work could incorporate ship-navigation data, potentially expanding the method’s reach across maritime environments.

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