Tactic: Lateral Movement

Technique: Through (Custom) Communication Protocol

Autonomous robots often have many different components with different layers of software running on it. Some of these components might be able to communicate through a (custom) communication protocol. An adversary can attempt to control these different components through this protocol, resulting in lateral movement.

Technique in practice

Article: lateral movement

Mitigations

If communication via this protocol is not strictly necessary it could be disabled.

Detections

Monitoring software could check if communication from a particular source is authorized.

Documented incidents with autonomous robots

Here a Unitree GO1 is seen being controlled via MQTT:

Documented incidents in other domains

No incidents known at the time of writing.