Hackers compromise 14,500 Dahua web cameras in 35-day campaign

In a large-scale campaign that researchers dubbed CameraSwarm, hackers compromised more than 14,500 Dahua IP cameras mostly in Ukraine and Russia.

The operation ran for at least 35 days between June 17 and July 22, compromising devices by exploiting vulnerabilities, brute-forcing logins, and using offline recovery codes from serial numbers for cloud-registered cameras.

Researchers at threat intelligence company Hunt.io discovered the campaign after finding a working directory on an HTTP server that the operator left unprotected.

Hunt.io recovered 407 MB of data comprising 2,616 files across 234 directories, including source code, logs, credentials, captured camera images, shell history, and exploitation results, which helped them map an impressive operation.

According to their findings, the 35-day CameraSwarm campaign compromised 14,530 Dahua IP cameras using three attack methods in parallel: