Inside Operation CameraSwarm: How One Actor Took Over 14,000 Dahua Cameras
One actor compromised over 14,000 Dahua cameras in Ukraine and Russia using brute-force, authentication bypass, and cloud relay serial-number abuse.
Hunt.io reconstructed Operation CameraSwarm from an exposed operator directory, revealing one actor compromised 14,000+ Dahua cameras between June 17 and July 22, 2026, mainly in Ukraine and Russia. The toolkit included a brute-force engine, a two-flaw 2021 authentication-bypass chain planting a persistent backdoor account on 1,923 cameras, and abuse of Dahua's cloud relay where 89.4% of probed serials returned open, unauthenticated channels. A SalatStealer Windows binary and Defender-disabling PowerShell script were staged on the same server but appear unrelated to the camera campaign.
New Python-Based Payload MechaFlounder Used by Chafer
Unit 42 identified MechaFlounder, a new Python backdoor used by the Chafer group to target a Turkish government entity via HTTP-based C2.
Unit 42 reports that in November 2018 the Chafer group targeted a Turkish government entity, reusing the win10-update[.]com infrastructure reported earlier in 2018 by ClearSky. The new secondary payload, tracked as MechaFlounder, is Python compiled with PyInstaller and acts as a backdoor supporting file upload/download and command execution. It beacons over HTTP using anomalous GET requests containing the username and hostname, suggesting a custom C2 server rather than a standard web server. Code overlap with OilRig's Clayside VBScript was noted, but Chafer and OilRig remain tracked as separate groups.
Hackers Mass-Scan Exposed Vite Servers to Steal AWS and Azure Cloud Credentials
F5 honeypots record mass scanning of exposed Vite dev servers exploiting CVE-2026-39364 to harvest AWS and Azure cloud credentials.
F5 honeypots recorded 807 session-grouped attacks and roughly 32,000 raw events in August 2026 against internet-exposed Vite development servers, up from 1,732 events in the previous three months. Scanners abused CVE-2026-39364 (Vite 7.1.0-7.3.1, 8.0.0-8.0.4), bypassing server.fs.deny via @fs routes with ?raw/?import query parameters and double encoding to read .env files, AWS SSO caches, Azure tokens, and Terraform state. The same infrastructure also probed CVE-2025-29927 (Next.js), CVE-2025-30208, CVE-2025-31125 (KEV-listed January 2026), and CVE-2024-45811. Most traffic originated from Google Cloud IP ranges, with the US accounting for 17,297 events.