Spoofing: Ballistic Missile Spoof

In this variant, attackers deploy decoys or emitters designed to mimic ballistic-missile signatures so early-warning and missile-defense systems allocate interceptors and attention to false targets. Decoys can shape radar cross-section and thermal profiles, stage deployment to simulate staging events, or use cooling/heating to emulate plume and body signatures, while coordinated timing and trajectories reinforce plausibility. The objective is resource depletion and distraction: saturate tracking, cueing, and discrimination so defenses are preoccupied prior to an actual strike or are left with reduced capacity afterward. Although the immediate target is the defense architecture, space-based sensors and their ground processing are integral to the effect; spoofed scenes enter the normal detection and tracking pipelines and propagate as authoritative truth until later discrimination overturns them.

ID: EX-0014.05
Sub-technique of:  EX-0014
Notional Risk (H | M | L):  12 | 12 | 12
Tactic:
Created: 2023/04/22
Last Modified: 2026/03/11

Countermeasures

ID Name Tiering Description NIST Rev5 ISO 27001 Onboard SV Ground
CM0009 Threat Intelligence Program A threat intelligence program helps an organization generate their own threat intelligence information and track trends to inform defensive priorities and mitigate risk. Leverage all-source intelligence services or commercial satellite imagery to identify and track adversary infrastructure development/acquisition. Countermeasures for this attack fall outside the scope of the mission in the majority of cases. PM-16 PM-16(1) RA-10 RA-3 RA-3(2) RA-3(3) SA-3 SA-8 SI-4(24) SR-8 A.5.7 A.5.7 6.1.2 8.2 9.3.2 A.8.8 A.5.7 A.5.2 A.5.8 A.8.25 A.8.31 A.8.27 A.8.28