PHOTON-Beetle is an authenticated encryption scheme, which was a finalist in the NIST’s call for standardization in the area of lightweight cryptography (LWC). There are certain difficulties while executing known fault attacks on PHOTON-Beetle in the real world. One of the attacks is in the random fault model, but it requires 237.15faults, which makes it difficult to implement in practice. Other attacks require fewer faults (29.32and 211.5) but rely on the bit-fault models, which necessitates expensive tools and detailed information about the implementation. In this paper, we bridge this gap by presenting an attack that is based on a realistic fault model that requires only 29. We employ a new fault attack technique called linked ineffective fault attack (LIFA). Our attack does not require knowing the plaintext or the corresponding ciphertext. Compared to conventional key-recovery techniques, we provide a highly efficient algebraic method for obtaining the secret key. Furthermore, we introduce linked effective fault analysis (LEFA) and show that, in a noisy environment, LEFA performs significantly better than LIFA in attacking the PHOTON-Beetle while maintaining the basic assumptions of LIFA. We verify our attack using several simulations, as well as conducting practical experiments in the ATmega328P against the publicly available PHOTON-Beetle implementation made available by the designers.