An exposed operator directory reveals how one actor compromised 14,000+ Dahua cameras across Ukraine and Russia, no password needed for most.A researcher discovered an exposed directory containing the tools of an attacker who compromised more than 14,000 Dahua cameras between June 17 and July 22, 2026, mainly in Ukraine and Russia. Hunt.io reconstructed the operation, named Operation CameraSwarm, from the leaked files and telemetry. The find started with a mistake. On 23 July, Hunt.io’s AttackCapture system crawled a server at 154.86[.]119.60 and pulled down 2,616 files across 234 subdirectories, 407 MB in total, from an HTTP directory the operator had left wide open. That single slip handed researchers the operator’s scanning engine, exploit chains, exfiltration bot, and a Windows stealer staged on the same box.“This is the second Dahua-related camera compromise operation we’ve traced back to an exposed operator directory in as many weeks. Where last week’s investigation centered on a Russian-speaking operator running a purpose-built platform against 58 cameras, this one is a different scale entirely.” reads the report published by Hunt.io.The brute-force engine alone reached over 12,300 unique addresses. A separate authentication-bypass chain, built around two 2021 Dahua vulnerabilities, planted a persistent backdoor account on 1,923 cameras, an account stored independently of the admin password that survives both a password change and, on most firmware, a factory reset. A third path skipped IP addresses entirely and reached 283 cameras purely by serial number, through Dahua’s own cloud relay.That third path is the part worth sitting with. Most of those cameras were exposed online without authentication.Dahua’s cloud relay lets any app reach a camera sitting behind NAT using nothing but its serial number, and authentication to that relay runs on credentials baked identically into every Dahua client ever shipped. The operator’s own code logs the result of probing this channel at scale: 89.4 percent of live serials returned an open, no-authentication channel. Nine out of ten cameras, reachable by anyone who could guess or harvest a serial number.“The device never authenticates the connecting party. It authenticates the session, via a token the cloud issued before the device was contacted. Obtaining that token requires only the fixed SDK credentials shared by every legitimate Dahua application.” continues the report. “The only real barrier to reaching any camera through this path is knowing its serial number, precisely what the operator’s harvesting pipeline exists to produce at scale.”Getting from the tunnel session to full admin access still requires valid credentials or an authentication bypass. However, the attacker’s own logs suggest that most exposed cameras did not need this final step.There are also two important details about the reported CVEs. The tool links its persistent backdoor technique to CVE-2024-39943, but that CVE actually refers to a different command-injection flaw in Rejetto’s HTTP File Server. The technique is valid, but the CVE reference is wrong. Likewise, the relay abuse is not CVE-2025-31702, which Dahua describes as a narrower authenticated privilege-escalation flaw. Incorrect CVE references can send defenders looking for the wrong fix.Hunt.io also found something that had nothing to do with cameras: a UPX-packed Windows binary, tagged as SalatStealer, staged on the same server alongside a PowerShell script that disables Windows Defender five different ways, including a Group Policy key built to survive reboots and Defender updates. The researchers treat it as a separate, unrelated capability riding along on shared infrastructure, not part of the camera campaign proper.What stands out across the whole toolkit is that none of it was built from scratch. The brute-force engine, the bypass chain, the relay tooling, the recovery-code generator: each traces to a different public repository, credited (sometimes accurately) to at least six other developers. The operator assembled, patched, and rewrote, layering Russian comments over Spanish code in one component recovered in three separate stages of the same rewrite.“The same toolkit also recovers stored device passwords outright, through a routine that derives its decryption key entirely from values the attacker already holds, device class prefix and serial number, so no device secret is needed. A residual Spanish comment in that code confirms it came from the same upstream source as the original brute-forcer.” states the report.aThe offline recovery-code generator is arguably the most consequential piece precisely because it doesn’t need a compromised device at all. Given a live serial number, it derives a code entirely offline that unlocks Dahua’s cloud-level account-recovery flow, no current credentials required. Removing a backdoor account doesn’t touch this. Only Dahua changing how the code is derived would.For anyone running Dahua gear, or the OEM-rebranded lines built on the same backend (Amcrest, Lorex, Annke, Swann, among others), the practical checklist is short: check for a p2pwn account and remove it, disable P2P on any device where it isn’t actually needed, confirm firmware is patched against the 2021 bypass pair, and rotate every credential that camera ever held, since the exfiltration bot grabbed those too. None of that fixes the recovery-code problem. That one sits with the vendor.Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and MastodonPierluigi Paganini(SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)