October 14, 2026
Undersea Cable Security in the Indo-Pacific Starts With Vessel Behavior
Executive brief #3 From AIS screening to behavior analysis
What’s inside?
The Automatic Identification System (AIS) has profoundly changed our understanding of what is happening at sea, providing a deeper understanding of where ships are and where they are headed at all times. However, what AIS does not answer is: What is the ship doing? Why is it doing that? What is its importance?
A skilled analyst can answer that question, however, they may require hours or even days to do so. With the rise of false positives, this means transactions would slow down significantly, transforming compliance risks into operational risks.
Training artificial intelligence algorithms to conduct expert shipping analysis automatically speeds-up vessel due diligence processes and provides compliance professionals with always up-to-date recommendations. Such automation helps minimize false positives and maintain existing compliance frameworks and controls without needing additional domain experts.
Key takeaways
- AIS manipulations and sanctions evasion – Behavior analysis can shed light on the context of questionable activities at sea, generating valuable insights that can support decision making.
- Behavior analysis: The case of the Pacific Bravo – To determine whether or not a vessel was evading sanctions requires deep domain knowledge, expertise in sanctions evasion typologies, and above all, time.
- Scale up behavior analysis with artificial intelligence (AI) – Integrating advanced AI capabilities into vessel due diligence enables automatic clearance of low-risk events and flags suspicious patterns of behavior.
Download the full brief
Featured posts
Undersea Cable Security in the Indo-Pacific Starts With Vessel Behavior
At a Glance Undersea Cable Security in the Pacific Runs Through Hawaii and Guam Undersea cable security in the Indo-Pacific comes down to a handful of islands. Hawaii and Guam anchor the trans-Pacific links that connect the continental U.S. to its forces, allies, and partners across the theater. Honolulu itself sits on that infrastructure. The…
Read more
Security Worries Reshape Russia’s September Oil Exports
At a Glance Russia Holds Crude Exports Steady as Falsely Flagged Tankers Disappear Russia shipped 142.7 million barrels of crude, clean petroleum products (CPP) in September, according to Windward analysis using Vortexa data. Crude made up 110.4 million barrels, a pace of some 3.7 million barrels per day, broadly level with the prior month, which…
Read more
Tanker Attacks Spread Beyond the Strait of Hormuz as Gulf Freight Costs Soar
At a Glance A Tanker Is Struck Off Qatar as Gulf Attacks Surge An unnamed tanker was struck by multiple projectiles 51 nautical miles off Madinat ash Shamal, Qatar, according to an October 7 report from UK Maritime Trade Operations. UKMTO has reported 16 attacks on ships in the Middle East Gulf in the past…
Read more
War-Diverted Traffic Is Reshaping NEOM’s Port. What Happens If Hormuz Reopens?
At a Glance A Port Not Behaving Like the Megacity It Was Built For By any reasonable metric, 2026 should have been a difficult year for the Port of NEOM. The megacity it was built to serve has been through a visible contraction. The Public Investment Fund wrote down the giga-projects by $8 billion at…
Read more
What a 25-Day AIS Blackout Off Libya Tells Us About Mediterranean Narcotics Routes
At a Glance The 25-Day Gap Between Albania and Libya In late August 2026, a Mali-flagged general cargo vessel left an Albanian port, declared Egypt as its destination, and switched off its AIS transponder in open water off eastern Libya. For 25 days and 8 hours, nothing was transmitted. When it reappeared on September 23,…
Read more
Vessels Loiter Over Subsea Cables and Pipelines Across Five Theaters
At a Glance Chinese Survey Grids Converge on the Guam and Japan Cable Corridors Two Chinese state-linked vessels have spent September running structured survey grids over separate transpacific subsea cable corridors, one around the Guam cable hub and one over the Japan to U.S. cables east of Japan. A Chinese-flagged fishery patrol vessel operated by…
Read more
Explore more
Mission Area Monitoring: Maintaining Maritime Operational Awareness
In Q2 2026, Windward recorded 3,137 prolonged dark activity events involving 2,157 unique cargo ships and tankers over 10,000 DWT, and 171,286 distinct vessels affected by GPS jamming at least once. None of those figures describe a list of vessels. They describe conditions inside specific stretches of water. That distinction is the operational problem of...
Read More
From Pixels to Findings: How Image Analytics Changes What Satellite Imagery Can Tell You
Satellite imagery has always shown you what’s in a scene. Every dot, every wake, every hull is a detection. What it hasn’t done, until now, is tell you who that detection is, and whether you should care. That’s the gap Windward’s new Image Analytics closes. It’s made up of two capabilities released together: Vessel Correlation,...
Read More
Introducing GPS Jamming Resilience: Cutting False Vessel Activity From Contested Waters
Windward is releasing GPS Jamming Resilience, a new platform capability that automatically identifies and suppresses the false vessel activity generated by GPS interference, before any of it reaches an analyst. It launches already proven. Since Operation Epic Fury began in late February, the capability has filtered more than 2.2 million false ship-to-ship (STS) meeting records...
Read More
Ground Truth: Windward’s 2026 Commitment to Verified Maritime Intelligence
By Ariel Zibziner, VP Business Services, Windward Data Integrity in an Era of High-Frequency Signal Manipulation As we conclude 2025, the maritime domain is characterized by a trust deficit in digital signaling. The convergence of major global conflicts — continued hostilities in Ukraine, Houthi attacks disrupting Red Sea transit, suspected infrastructure sabotage in the Baltic,...
Read More
Windward Launches WhatsApp Integration for Instant Risk Insights
At a Glance Redefining Vessel Screening for a Real-Time World In global trade and shipping, decisions are rarely made from behind a desk. A call from port control, a sudden request from a counterpart, or a time-sensitive deal can trigger the need for immediate screening. Whether it’s a compliance check to prevent sanctions breaches or...
Read More