PhantomTac Attack Tricks Robots Into Dropping or Crushing Objects

Researchers have demonstrated PhantomTac, an attack in which small magnetic tags — about 0.5 millimetres thick and concealable under barcode or QR-code stickers — fool robots' magnetic touch sensors into misreading contact force, Hackread reports. In grasping tests the attack succeeded more than 95% of the time when the tag was within 8 millimetres of the intended placement, causing a robotic arm to drop or crush objects and a humanoid robot to misjudge contact; the paper, accepted for ACM CCS 2026, demonstrates controlled attacks rather than incidents involving deployed robots.