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Finnish Monitor Flooded With 18,000 ‘Ghost Ship’ Signals in the Baltic

Authorities attribute the surge to a commercial tracking failure, underscoring GNSS alerts now posted in Nordic airspace.

Overview

  • A Helsingin Sanomat report citing Traficom said a Parainen receiver briefly logged nearly 18,000 AIS positions that showed NATO ships in the Gulf of Finland even though they were thousands of kilometers away.
  • Traficom described the episode as a large-scale fault linked to commercial vessel-tracking services and said systems used by Finnish authorities continued to function.
  • Finnish aviation services issued a notice warning of possible GNSS disruptions across the Helsinki flight information region, effective until about the morning of 12 November.
  • Aviation authorities in Sweden and Lithuania have active advisories on probable GPS jamming or spoofing extending into late January 2026 in parts of their airspace.
  • AIS signals are unencrypted and vulnerable to falsification, and Kpler reports a 2,400% rise in spoofing cases since 2022, though the cause of the Finnish incident remains unconfirmed.