Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance (opens in new tab)

Yea, this is more like vandalizing Wikipedia than spoofing or interfering with safety-critical systems. It's juvenile, but probably not crashing any planes. It'll get reverted, and then presumably the adsb exchange website will tighten up their security.

I had also posted this story earlier, then deleted it once I learned that. However, I did find this interesting doc about real ADS-B spoofing, which does not appear to be very easy:

https://www.icao.int/sites/default/files/APAC/Meetings/2025/...

Just because I don't often get a chance to talk about this, I'll mention that there was a malfunction/accident/bug that caused what you might call spoofed signals to go out around Long Island and New York. Really interesting case where it seems that an FAA system wasn't handling magnetic declination correctly, which led to it generating false TIS-B targets that were rotated 13 degrees from real aircraft positions, from the radar antenna point of view: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1508505542423064578

(TIS-B is a system that broadcasts ADS-B-like signals for aircraft that are being tracked by radar but either don't have ADS-B Out or otherwise might not be picked up by other aircraft with ADS-B In, e.g. maybe they're at a low altitude.)

There have been a couple other incidents with the TIS-B system. E.g. this apparent test near Dallas in 2022 that generated dozens of false targets in an interesting pattern: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1481712428932997122 There was a similar incident around LAX several months later.

Notably, the history of this aircraft shows MLAT as the source for all tracking. This spoof is the first ads-b “track” for this plane.

But there’s so much wrong with the data: 50k ft at 80knots (ground speed!) in a 747.

(Of course if you were spoofing ADS-B RF signals you wouldn't necessarily need to be anywhere near the spoofed locations. Just like with GPS spoofing.)

I agree with this. Hopefully they're able to track down who did this. To upload to ADS-B Exchange you need an account. But it's not that difficult to get one. I'm not sure what kind of information they may be able to get on it. As you say the person who uploaded this may not be anywhere near there. The aggregators probably should have heuristics like if only one feeder in an area with a decent density of feeder coverage uploads an anomalous track, it should get flagged.

Seems like it wasn't actually spoofed radio signals, but spoofed data collection uploaded to adsbexchange. Still seems unlikely to make the FAA happy, but not as bad. I assume air traffic controllers aren't relying on adsbexchange?

plus they did that right next to an airport

Depends, how much did DOGE fuck with their leadership and management.

We now have to both identify obama judges, trump judges and trump bootlickers.

Source:Other

There it is. Someone running a fake feeder uploaded fake data. No spoofed signals were actually sent over the radio.

If you get the DF17 frames and extract the airborne position messages Type Codes 9–18.

Then CPR decode them into latitude/longitude....plus plot enough spoofed positions so the point cloud forms a QR code like raster on the map, then scan the rendered pattern...you get a URL to the unredacted Epstein files.

Actually spoofing ADSB radio signals could very well land you in prison with a $100,000 fine. The FCC is very eager to find and fine you for these kinds of stunts.

Spamming flightaware is much less severe, but still... it's not cute to mess with life-safety critical infrastructure.

Domestic terrorism is now an official policy goal of the "US" government, so yes, there is a lot of it.

My favorite one is "Emo JD Vance" with the heavy eyeliner and the scene haircut: https://www.amazon.com/Vance-Meme-Emo-Republican-Conservativ...

Yassified Vance, which a Republican congressman actually created and posted as a legit fan edit is also very funny: https://x.com/KatAbughazaleh/status/1841491297145634831

I had a few chuckles reading that. Thanks.

Most planes broadcast their position using ADS-B, and some websites collect these signals and visualize them so you can track flight paths. Somebody broadcast a fake flight path that draws a picture of JD Vance on these sites: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adfdf9&lat=26.678&lon=-...

ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) is a protocol for planes to publish their positions, so help with the whole "not crashing into each other" thing. The data is mostly for pilots and air traffic control, but it is publicly available, and there's a number of sites that track the data so that you can see what planes are overhead or whatever.

Someone spoofed Airforce One's transponder, had it declare itself as "VANCE 1", and then fly a pattern to display the meme. Or lied to one or more of the major sites, pretending to be listening in on the ADS-B signals. It's unclear. Regardless, it's a very funny hack.

Pilots and nerds that watch airplane traffic

Viewable on FlightRadar24, etc

> Where would this have been seen?

on HN, mostly

These are hobbyist sites, not critical infrastructure. Commercial aviation doesn't use them.

> It's analogous to "hobby" code running key infrastructure of the internet

I have some bad news my dude lol

It’s not “illegal broadcast which engages the FAA and FCC to hunt you down” illegal, but that doesn’t exclude other prosecutions.

ADS-B is packet data telemetry broadcast unencrypted and unauthenticated by aircraft on 1090MHz.

Anyone can receive it, and many do. FlightRadar and others have networks of people with receivers that forward all received packets to central servers.

The aircraft self-report location, heading, altitude, etc, so anyone can transmit packets making ghost planes.

I am somewhat surprised nobody has stashed an ADS-B spoofer near ATL or AMS that just broadcasts tracks of A380 tail numbers crossing the runways perpendicular at 500 ft AGL or something. They have primary radar, sure, but I imagine there would still be a temporary disruption until people figured out what was going on.

I think this is the first case I’ve seen of ADS-B spoofing in the wild.

EDIT: this was spoofed reports to the data aggregators via the internet, not broadcast on radio waves. I’ve still never seen or heard tell of RF ADS-B spoofing.

No real 747 flew this. It was a prank using impossible flight data via ADS-B spoofing. Ground-based “software-defined radios” (SDRs) broadcast fake transponder signals to trick ADS-B Exchange. This works because both the ADS-B & AIS systems use unencrypted, unauthenticated data.

I believe this was "spoofed" only in the sense that a particular provider/online platform accepted data via an API that was abused to draw this on that platform only. Searching around it seems it was not found if you looked on other platforms, so it might not even have been a crime. I believe they didn't emit any real "signals" just took advantage of an API that should probably be better secured.

Doubt it did anything in RF, only sent packets to adsbexchange’s web service that its volunteers feed it.

Also Adsbexchange has had some… history:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ADSB/comments/10l2euc/adsb_exchange...

https://hackaday.com/2023/01/26/ads-b-exchange-sells-up-cont...

ADSB sites aren't any sort of official thing. You can send whatever data you want to them. Just because it's there doesn't mean it ever went over the air as an ADSB broadcast.

Agreed with other commenters that nothing was likely actually broadcast, but if it was it would definitely be highly illegal and you’d have feds knocking down your door pretty quickly. They don’t joke around with illegal transmissions like that.

It's almost certainly a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because it's an extremely broad law.

An interesting question.

Assuming the FAA has the authority to enforce ADSB requirements (an open question post-Chevron), I can’t find any regulation saying non-aircrafts cannot transmit ADSB. Only ones saying aircrafts in certain categories must.

There’s probably some non-interference requirement somewhere (FCC spectrum licensing perhaps), but I’m not seeing it immediately.

All this is in the hypothetical that RF was transmitted, which as others point out it probably wasn’t.