The camera should never face the public internet. Put it behind a VPN or a Zero-Trust tunnel. If you must allow remote viewing, use Axis’s AVHS (Axis Video Hosting System) service, which brokers the connection without opening ports on your firewall.

Go to Setup > Plain Config (advanced). Find the parameter HTTPEnabled . Set to No . Set HTTPSEnabled to Yes . Then, find UserFile related entries and ensure .shtml is not listed as an executable extension for anonymous users.

For defenders: If this article described your infrastructure, your remediation window is now zero. For researchers: The thrill of finding a live camera is real, but observe the Hippocratic Oath of hacking— First, do no harm.

Standard Axis cameras run on port 80 or 443. But many video servers run on non-standard ports. By adding "exclusive," researchers discovered that Axis servers using ActiveX controls or older Java applets for video viewing generate unique URL structures when a user has "exclusive viewing rights."