The Hunt.io research team found an open directory staging the full toolkit behind an intrusion into a Philippine nuclear research agency and a naval contractor. The ownCloud path is the interesting part technically.

CVE-2023-49105 lets you forge pre-signed WebDAV URLs when the signing secret is empty, which is the default state on a fresh install. Five custom Python scripts on the server implement this: the signing routine passes an empty bytes literal as the PBKDF2 salt, sets OC-Credential to the account being impersonated, and issues GET requests against /remote.php/dav/files/<account>/<path>, receiving files as that user with no credentials. Four scripts target one account each, the fifth adds PROPFIND enumeration with Depth: 1 to walk folders that were not pre-enumerated.

The naval contractor was hit separately via CVE-2024-28000 (LiteSpeed Cache) using a custom Go reimplementation of MT19937 with PHP mt_rand() parity, verified against 11 known seed/output pairs, plus an XML-RPC brute force with rockyou.txt. Both produced unauthorized access independently.

We also found a separate, possibly unrelated EtherHiding compromise on the same WordPress site. A HuntSQL query on the smart contract address returned 174 unique IPs hosting likely compromised pages with the same NoChain loader strings.

Full writeup with IOCs, the signing routine, and MITRE mapping: https://hunt.io/blog/chinese-speaking-operator-philippine-nuclear-naval-contractor

An operator left their full working directory exposed on an open HTTP server. Hunt.io crawled it, 2,616 files, and rebuilt the campaign from the corpus.

• Three exploitation paths in parallel: an asyncio credential brute-forcer, a CVE-2021-33044/33045 auth-bypass chain, and P2P relay abuse reaching cameras by serial number
• The relay path never authenticates the connecting party, only the session, via a cloud-issued token obtainable with the fixed SDK credentials in every Dahua client
• Two CVE labels in the tooling don't hold up: CVE-2024-39943 is an unrelated Rejetto HFS flaw, and CVE-2025-31702 is a narrower post-auth case, not the unauthenticated relay abuse (that path is a separate non-CVE issue documented by ITRES)
• Full PTCP tunnel breakdown, including the Inverted STUN packet and the bind-to-127.0.0.1 technique

Neutral attribution throughout, the corpus shows how the operation was built and run, not who ran it.

Check the full breakdown, IOCs and mitigation strategies:
https://hunt.io/blog/operation-cameraswarm-dahua-cameras-compromised