Multicast communication of mobile ad hoc networks is vulnerable to internal attacks due to its routing structure and high scalability of its participants. Though existing intrusion detection systems (IDSs) act smartly to defend against attack strategies, adversaries also accordingly update their attacking plans intelligently so as to intervene in successful defending schemes. In our work, we present a novel indirect internal stealthy attack on a tree‐based multicast routing protocol. Such an indirect stealthy attack intelligently makes neighbor nodes drop their routing‐layer unicast control packets instead of processing or forwarding them. The adversary targets the collision avoidance mechanism of the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol to indirectly affect the routing layer process. Simulation results show the success of this attacking strategy over the existing “stealthy attack in wireless ad hoc networks: detection and countermeasure (SADEC)” detection system. We design a cross‐layer automata‐based stealthy attack on multicast routing protocols (SAMRP) attacker detection system to identify and isolate the proposed attacker. NS‐2 simulation and analytical results show the efficient performance, against an indirect internal stealthy attack, of SAMRP over the existing SADEC and BLM attacker detection systems.