In one of the most sophisticated tests ever reported against Global Positioning System (GPS), students from the University of Texas at Austin, US, managed to send a yacht hundreds of meters off course by spoofing GPS signals.

The test was conducted off the coast of Italy in June, when the University of Texas students successfully piloted an $80 million superyacht, sailing 30 miles offshore in the Mediterranean Sea. The students managed to override the yacht's GPS signals, without raising any alarm among the crew-members who thought that the yacht was moving perfectly on course.

The 65-meter White Rose of Drachs luxury yacht - owned by British property magnate Michael Evans - was led astray by University of Texas research team, led by Todd Humphreys, an assistant professor from UT Austin's department of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics.

For the test of the yacht's GPS system, the researchers took a GPS spoofing device the size of a briefcase up to the upper deck of the yacht, while it was sailing in international waters; and was en route from Monaco to Rhodes, Greece.

Noting that, to carry out the experiment, the researchers needed to generate fake signals which were slightly different from the legitimate ones, Humphreys said in an interview that the researchers "mimicked the entire GPS constellation."

Humphreys further elaborated: "We had a counterpart for each signal coming down from every satellite in the sky. When they mixed together with legitimate signals in the receiver, ours were slightly stronger."