A tech CEO says his firm may have witnessed a groundbreaking defensive cyberattack that tricked Iranian missiles into crashing into the Mediterranean during the recent Iran-Israel conflict.
Sean Gorman, CEO of location-tech startup Zephyr, believes his team may have spotted an “exotic” and highly advanced form of GNSS spoofing—one capable of faking not just false positions, but entire flight paths.
Normally, spoofing hijacks navigation systems by overpowering real satellite signals and feeding fake location data. Most spoofed devices “teleport” instantly to one spot. But this time, the behavior was different.
While monitoring signal activity in Haifa during the war, Zephyr’s team noticed that a phone running their software reported a strange trajectory—a smooth arc out into the sea, as if following a missile’s path.
“It wasn’t jamming or typical spoofing,” said Gorman. “The position data didn’t jump—it moved in a curve, like a guided object being rerouted mid-air. That’s a new pattern we’ve never seen before.”
Zephyr had deployed phones globally, backed by a U.S. government research grant, to study spoofing in regions known for electronic warfare. The anomaly was spotted only once, in the midst of Iranian missile fire over northern Israel.
Gorman believes the missiles may have been tricked into thinking they were still locked onto their original targets—even as they drifted harmlessly out to sea.
No actor has been identified, but the signal appeared to originate somewhere in the Middle East.
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