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

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.

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