A vessel can now be in two places at once. Not physically. Only in the record that everyone downstream treats as fact.

That is the uncomfortable part of running a fleet on screens. The picture looks complete because whatever was wrong has already been smoothed out before it reaches the office. Confidence rises while certainty does not.

Owners and managers are buying decision support at a pace their verification habits have not matched. Technology providers know this better than anyone. So who is checking the feed before the feed starts making the call?

Four tankers in the Black Sea reporting from a single square kilometre of Lima is easy to dismiss as a curiosity. The 1,702 impossible jumps recorded in the Gulf of Oman in one week are harder to laugh off. Together they describe an industry that has quietly built its commercial machinery on a broadcast nobody verifies.

AIS was designed for collision avoidance. It has since become the evidence base for sanctions screening and insurance pricing and cargo valuation. Yet the protocol still has no way to check whether a ship is where it says it is. The receivers listen. The databases record. The cleaning algorithms then remove whatever looks wrong and pass along a feed that appears clean.

That last step is the risk. Filtering hides the tampering rather than exposing it. An operator can screen a counterparty vessel against a tidy track and never learn that a third of the reports in that region arrived with the navigation system flagged as inoperative. The decision looks defensible on paper. The paper is the problem.

The timing matters. Shipping has spent the past two years absorbing ransomware attacks on ports and ship managers alongside a steady rise in GNSS interference around the Gulf and the Baltic. Regulators have responded with cyber requirements for systems onboard. Data arriving from outside the hull has received far less attention even though it now drives decisions in the office. A spoofed AIS track does not need to breach a firewall to do damage. It only needs to be believed.

What Worldwide AIS Network is proposing is a change in where verification happens. Checking at the antenna rather than in the archive turns interference into something an operator can see as it occurs. Trust in navigation data has to be earned at the point of reception. Shipowners and managers who continue to treat a clean feed as a true feed are carrying an exposure that no insurer has yet priced.

WARRANT is developing a framework for dependable digital shipping, integrating safety, cybersecurity, resilience and human factors. It builds digital-twin and knowledge-based tools to assess risks, detect threats and support trustworthy operation of connected maritime systems.

Join our workshop on 25 September, focused on DANAOS Deep-Sea Shipping. It will explore maritime risk assessment, GNSS spoofing, Digital Twin-based threat identification and mitigation, and adversarial attacks on computer vision. Help assess the scenarios and shape requirements for dependable containership systems.

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Beyond the workshop, continue the exchange through the Digital Green Shipping Alliance.

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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA). Neither the European Union nor CINEA can be held responsible for them. WARRANT has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101202581.

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CYTUR’s assessment of more than a dozen marine systems found 94% warranted cyber risk treatment, with the report urging shipowners to assess exposure, connectivity and operational impact alongside vulnerability counts.