Originally Posted by
MountainBear
This thought occurred to me too but Immarsat swears that it is
absolutely certain they have the right device ID for the terminal. If it turns out they are wrong there are going to be some very very embarrassed people in the UK.
Spoofing would probably be possible, but would take a substantial amount of technical knowledge. The pings along show it's not a stationary terminal, unless someone has dismantled it and managed to adjust the synchronization internally to just the right level with millisecond accuracy, or has written some pretty complex software to emulate a terminal. They'd also need to know just when the real 777's SATCOM terminal went off so they could turn theirs on.
If it's not the real terminal, this would probably be the most sophisticated hijacking ever seen (which, admittedly, it may still turn out to be).