Media Leaks: Baltic Sea Filled with Military "Ghost Ships"
Moscow, November 7th, Xinhua News Agency
According to a report by the Finnish Helsingin Sanomat, citing the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom), a large number of "ghost ship" signals were recorded in the Baltic Sea - these are military vessels from NATO that should be elsewhere.
The report said: "A strange incident occurred at the shipping service on Monday. The Baltic Sea suddenly seemed to be filled with warships. In fact, most of the ships were far away from the Baltic Sea at that time."
The newspaper cited an example where a Spanish warship appeared in the Gulf of Finland, while according to Traficom's information, the ship was supposed to be on its way from Somalia to Japan.
The report explained: "The error seems to originate from the ship automatic identification system signal receiving station in Parainen. According to the records of this station, it usually only receives data from ships in the archipelago area."
According to the report, the Parainen receiving station normally gets the position data of less than 100 ships per hour, but on Sunday evening, the station connected to nearly 18,000 ships.
However, Traficom pointed out that this was just a large-scale failure, entirely due to problems with commercial ship tracking services. Aleksi Utula, head of the maritime monitoring department at the agency, told the media: "The system used by the authorities did not have any operational failures."
Torleiv Aarre Iversen, a Norwegian analyst and former naval officer, believes these events were caused by cybersecurity issues. He told the newspaper: "But I cannot determine whether it is a hardware error or some deliberate interference."
He pointed out that the characteristics of these events lie in their scale and the technical methods used for the failure or interference.
Original: www.toutiao.com/article/1848108846888010/
Statement: This article represents the views of the author himself.