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The Military Music

Ukraine Is Jamming Russia's 'Superweapon' With a Song (404media.co) 138

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from 404 Media: The Ukrainian Army is knocking a once-hyped Russian superweapon out of the sky by jamming it with a song and tricking it into thinking it's in Lima, Peru. The Kremlin once called its Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missiles "invincible." Joe Biden said the missile was "almost impossible to stop." Now Ukrainian electronic warfare experts say they can counter the Kinzhal with some music and a re-direction order. [...] Kinzhals and other guided munitions navigate by communicating with Russian satellites that are part of the GLONASS system, a GPS-style navigation network. Night Watch uses a jamming system called Lima EW to generate a disruption field that prevents anything in the area from communicating with a satellite. Many traditional jamming systems work by blasting receivers on munitions and aircraft with radio noise. Lima does that, but also sends along a digital signal and spoofs navigation signals. It "hacks" the receiver it's communicating with to throw it off course.

Night Watch shared pictures of the downed Kinzhals with 404 Media that showed a missile with a controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA), an active antenna that's meant to resist jamming and spoofing. "We discovered that this missile had pretty old type of technology," Night Watch said. "They had the same type of receivers as old Soviet missiles used to have. So there is nothing special, there is nothing new in those types of missiles." Night Watch told 404 Media that it used this Lima to take down 19 Kinzhals in the past two weeks. First, it replaces the missile's satellite navigation signals with the Ukrainian song "Our Father Is Bandera."

Any digital noise or random signal would work to jam the navigation system, but Night Watch wanted to use the song because they think it's funny. "We just send a song... we just make it into binary code, you know, like 010101, and just send it to the Russian navigation system," Night Watch said. "It's just kind of a joke. [Bandera] is a Ukrainian nationalist and Russia tries to use this person in their propaganda to say all Ukrainians are Nazis. They always try to scare the Russian people that Ukrainians are, culturally, all the same as Bandera." Once the song hits, Night Watch uses Lima to spoof a navigation signal to the missiles and make them think they're in Lima, Peru. Once the missile's confused about its location, it attempts to change direction. These missiles are fast -- launched from a MiG-31 they can hit speeds of up to Mach 5.7 or more than 4,000 miles per hour -- and an object moving that fast doesn't fare well with sudden changes of direction.

Ukraine Is Jamming Russia's 'Superweapon' With a Song

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  • Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Saturday November 22, 2025 @05:33AM (#65811691)

    The trumpistan chose to let putin win.

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      You got that right, Putin's secret weapon is his bitch in the Oval Office. If only Ukraine had a song that would neuter that idiot.

  • Make the 'location' such that the correction sends it back into Russia.
    • Re:Next step (Score:4, Informative)

      by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Saturday November 22, 2025 @07:20AM (#65811771)

      They can't. Any significant change in course causes the 4,000MPH missile to break apart. Only minor and fine course corrections are possible when the missile is at operating speed. Large course changes and it deconstructs.

      • Maybe they can send it to Transnistria.

      • Target one of the ghost ships or submarine in the Atlantic?

      • They can't. Any significant change in course causes the 4,000MPH missile to break apart. Only minor and fine course corrections are possible when the missile is at operating speed.

        Which seems like sloppy engineering. I'm not a rocket scientist or weapons designer but even I realize you'd want to put rate limits on your flight controls. And the flight control software ought to handle abrupt changes in received location.

        If I were the Russians, I'd be updating my software, not adding receivers. And if I were the Ukrainians, I'd be getting ready to tell the missiles they are only 10, then 20, 50, 100, 1000 meters away from where they really are.

        • You would change your missile system so that course changes outside the design requirement could allow an enemy to inject commands and turn the missile back on yourself?

          I'm not sure that you've fully thought through your "improvement".

          • You would change your missile system so that course changes outside the design requirement could allow an enemy to inject commands and turn the missile back on yourself?

            I'm not sure that you've fully thought through your "improvement".

            I have no idea how you read that in what I wrote.

            If I were the Russians, I'd be updating the software so that if the missile decides it needs to turn 180 degrees, it should limit it's turn to whatever the airframe can safely handle. And I'd update the software to treat location data with suspicion if the missile's position abruptly changes 10,000 miles when it had high confidence it knew where it was. And I'd update the software to fall back to dead reckoning or inertial guidance if I have reason to not tru

    • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      This is pure cope. I thought this site was full of technical people.

      GPS (and GLONASS) spoofing has been going on for years now. It's a non-stop back and forth to try to break the other side's protocols. Even fairly recently there's stories about spoofing causing Russian drones to go into Poland. However, the attacks never stopped, so either spoofing rarely succeeded, or the Russians patched it immediately.

      So in this case too, assuming there was a breakthrough, it'll be patched in a few days. We should be ab

  • by Megane ( 129182 ) on Saturday November 22, 2025 @06:45AM (#65811727)

    Any digital noise or random signal would work to jam the navigation system, but Night Watch wanted to use the song because they think it's funny.

    So they literally did it for the lulz.

    • I think one of the big things I've learned from this stupid war is watching ukranians on social media , and Ukranians are *very funny people*. I guess when your dirt poor, and live in a part of the world that turns to bitter ice for half the year you gotta have a sense of humor to go with the vodka.

  • Why not poof the location such that it gently turns back and hits the kremlin midget?

    • Or make it hit Belarussia, and hilarity ensues. Or, make it hit Poland and get NATO involved. No more jokes, but at least talks about Ukraine losing territories to Russia would be off the table...
    • Why not poof the location such that it gently turns back and hits the kremlin midget?

      That would be epic. Without knowing the missile's actual target, you probably can't spoof it accurately enough.

      I was wondering if you could make them collide in mid-air. That would be pretty cool. But if you're under attack, it's probably best to just kill the damn things now and not get cute. Kind of like now Dr. Evil should just shoot Austin Powers and skip the bad tempered sea bass.

  • The moment I hear that song I take a turn of 180 degrees.

  • by chr1973 ( 711475 ) on Saturday November 22, 2025 @07:55AM (#65811813)

    From the story:
    > ... and an object moving that fast doesn't fare well with sudden changes of direction.

    This seems strange to me...

    I would expect that the control system has various rate limiters and such. So even with a sudden change in estimated direction of velocity of the vehicle, I'd expect the control system to rate limit e.g. the reference state (or trajectory), and/or limit control signals to control surfaces. Further, if there's an abrupt change in estimated direction, I'd expect the control system to mark that signal as invalid and try to go with inertial navigation for awhile.

    Fun fact: When I worked with rockets, we checked and planned for layers in the atmosphere with different wind directions -- wind shear. Otherwise, to the rocket, it'll appear as a sudden increase in the angle of attack and in some cases the vehicle might break apart. Back then we released balloons with transponders to check for wind shear layers. I don't know if they still do that.

  • by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Saturday November 22, 2025 @08:07AM (#65811833)

    If you look at the design of GPS signals, they drew on then-novel (1970s) pseudorandom codes and digital matched filtering and multiplexing work that was being researched for both defense applications and also made its way into early CDMA cell phones.

    This is what lets up to 65 or something GPS signals broadcast on the same band at the same time and the receivers could disambiguate them apart.

    The GLONASS system didn't have that. There was no Soviet private communications sector driving that innovation and Soviet academics were very late to the gamr on all things digital (Store clerks used an abacus and think I remember my dad using a slide rule in the 80s when in the West cheap calculators were everywhere).

    So GLONASS was built using separate frequency bands for each satellite. There weren't enough bands allocated so satellites on opposite sides of the globe have to share bands so that no two satellites in view from anywhere overlap in frequency and jam eachother.

    I remember reading this at some point for the first time about 15 or 20 years ago when GPS III was on the drawing board here and Putin was making noise about reconstituting GLONASS to its full glory days. And I remember asking myself (yet again) how the fuck did such a backward place hold its own for so long?

    • Ideologically you don't need a million idiots with computers who don't respect any foundational prinsonpals for one second. In the animal kingdom it's known as Centralized Control... look up GreenDay-BadTouch.mp3 for a million-dollar education.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 22, 2025 @08:39AM (#65811875)

      so why do you defend chamberlain-ism surrender to this supposed weak country.

      Trump’s Ukraine Peace Deal Appears to Be Translated From Russian [newrepublic.com]

      how the fuck did such a backward place hold its own for so long?

      as far as today in this last decade because they have managed to manipulate the worst impulses of the conservative movement in america. it's funny that by supporting the "ukraine should give up" positions republicans are aligned with actual american communists who say the same, for the same reasons, they're russia simps even if for different reasons (but both are manipulated through russia hybrid warfare)

      "make america great"

      • You're pretending there's a good option on the table. There isn't one.

        Option 1 is make lots of noise about defending democracy while half assesly egging along an overt proxy war with a nuclear armed adversary, being prosecuted by a country just as crooked as that adversary (sharing centuries of cultural ties with it), just more broke.

        Option 2 is accepting that that aforementioned nuclear armed adversary actually achieved military conquest over some territory already (11 years ago) and exercises de facto con

        • A nuclear power lost...
          Vietnam
          Korea (tie is both losing)
          Iraq
          Afghanistan (twice; arguably they both lost their empires too.)
          Outside nations were involved back then too.
          Russian losses will be greater this time than that time. Somebody look it up; I bet they lost more money already.

    • by Mirnotoriety ( 10462951 ) on Saturday November 22, 2025 @08:48AM (#65811891)
      “GLONASS is generally more immune to satellite jamming than GPS, primarily due to its use of separate frequency bands (FDMA) for each satellite, which reduces the effectiveness of jamming a single frequency. In contrast, GPS uses the same frequencies for all satellites (CDMA), making it more susceptible to broad-spectrum jamming impacting all satellites at once”. ref [cambridge.org]
      • Yes, but it seems it can be spoofed. Military GPS is encrypted, so you can jam it, but you can't create a spoof. It appears the Ukrainians are spoofing a location. I think because Vlad many years ago opened up the GLONASS encrypted signal from what I can tell. So I'm thinking Ukraine can create a proper encrypted spoofed signal. I know Russia has been caught spoofing the non-encrypted GPS signal around some ports. Here is just one example, seems it is pretty common for them to do. https://en.usm.media/massi [en.usm.media]
        • Maybe just duplicate whatever glonass signals are being broadcast in peru or wherever (encrypted or not) and let the rocket think its halfway around the world? Its possible they do not have systems in place to ignore the signal if it suddenly changes and shows a location far away.

          • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

            Basically, a replay attack. The only GNSS immune to replay attacks is Galileo, and possibly Beidou. GPS encryption prevents the enemy from obtaining precise location data, and that's it. You can use a replay attack with the encrypted data, and you are good to go. Because Galileo was designed much later, when all these potential attack vectors were known about, they took steps to make it immune to them.
            What surprises me about this war is that all the drones are using GPS or Glonass rather than Galileo, espec

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      The main reason for pseudorandom codes was less about jamming and more about being able to grab a really weak signal buried in the noise. CDMA works by increasing the band's noise level but by running the noise through a correlator the signal.

      CDMA is "magic" in that you can get at signals buried below the noise floor - that by running the received noise through a correlator, a desired signal could magically pop out of the noise. Well, it wasn't quite so - the real noise floor (caused by everything) is still

  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Saturday November 22, 2025 @10:35AM (#65811999)

    can Russia try to use an DMCA take down to stop this?

  • I remember reading that the Finns started playing over radio frequencies the famous polka song "Säkkijärven polkka," which was found to be extremely effective in shutting down remote controlled land mines the Red Army placed on the ground and causing casualties for several months starting around September 1941. So much so that the Finnish Army ended its jamming practice by spring 1942 as the batteries on the Soviet mines lost its charge.

  • Thwarted the attack of the killer tomatoes. I wonder if the Ukrainian engineers had that in the back of their minds.

  • Forbes has a more detailed article [forbes.com] that explains both the latest Glonass spoofing technique and other approaches to jam or spoof satellite navigation systems in the Russia-Ukraine war.
  • Pull a Star Trek Beyond and use Sabotage by the Beastie Boys

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