FBI PIN Notification: HiatusRAT Actors Targeting Web Cameras and DVRs

Summary

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is releasing this Private Industry Notification (PIN) to highlight HiatusRAT¹ scanning campaigns against Chinese-branded web cameras and DVRs. Private sector partners are encouraged to implement the recommendations listed in the “Mitigation” column of the table below to reduce the likelihood and impact of these attack campaigns.

Threat

HiatusRAT is a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) whose latest iteration has likely been employed since July 2022. Malicious cyber actors commonly use RATs to take over and control a targeted device from a distance. The Hiatus campaign originally targeted outdated network edge devices. Cybersecurity companies have also observed these actors using the malware to target a range of Taiwan-based organizations and to carry out reconnaissance against a US government server used for submitting and retrieving defense contract proposals.²

In March 2024, HiatusRAT actors conducted a scanning campaign targeting Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The actors scanned web cameras and DVRs for vulnerabilities including CVE-2017-7921, CVE-2018-9995, CVE-2020-25078, CVE-2021-33044, CVE-2021-36260, and weak vendor-supplied passwords. Many of these vulnerabilities have not yet been mitigated by the vendors. In particular, the actors targeted Xiongmai and Hikvision devices with telnet access. They used Ingram—a webcam-scanning tool available on Github—to conduct scanning activity. And they used Medusa—an open-source brute-force authentication cracking tool—to target Hikvision cameras with telnet access. Targeted TCP ports have included: 23, 26, 554, 2323, 567, 5523, 8080, 9530, and 56575.

View the detailed notification below.

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¹ (U) Previous HiatusRAT campaigns have targeted edge routers to passively collect traffic and function as a covert network of command-and-control (C2) infrastructure.
² https://blog.lumen.com/hiatusrat-take-little-time-off-in-a-return-to-action/