Experts point to recent reports that Chinese hackers secretly retransmitted surveillance footage from the African Union headquarters building so that it could be seen overseas. This is consistent with a consistent pattern of electronic intrusion by Chinese networks into key African communications systems.
I’m not particularly surprised,” Joshua Meservey, a senior analyst on Africa at the Heritage Foundation, told the Voice of America, “We know China is doing this all over the world, including Africa. They’re obviously particularly interested in the African Union headquarters.”
Reuters reported in December that a Japanese cybersecurity firm notified African Union technicians of the security intrusion before the African Union held its 33rd summit last February.
Messervy said the cyber intrusion allegation was consistent behavior. A study he conducted found that Chinese companies had built at least 186 government buildings and 14 “sensitive communication networks between governments in Africa.”
There have also been recent reports that governments in countries such as Uganda and Rwanda have hacked into the WhatsApp and Skype accounts of dissidents and their supporters with the help of the Chinese company huawei.
China has been accused of conducting surveillance of the African Union. The French newspaper Le Monde reported in 2018 that China had installed bugs at the African Union headquarters. The report said servers at the African Union headquarters secretly transmitted data to a computer system in Shanghai from 12 midnight to 2 a.m. each day.
Messervy said private Chinese companies have a “legal obligation” to help the Chinese Communist Party gather intelligence.
Messervy said it was unclear whether the video footage from the alleged hacking of the African Union in 2020 was of strategic importance.
I’m a little confused as to why exactly they wanted surveillance footage, because as far as I know the footage has no sound,” Messervy said, “so I guess you can only track the physical movements of people. But they clearly felt it was worth doing.”
One possibility, Messervy said, is that China seeks to synthesize and feed the footage and other data into a system that builds artificial intelligence capabilities for face recognition and other information recognition.
“They’re collecting a lot of data on their own citizens, feeding it into AI systems and then refining it in that way,” he said, “so I think that’s one thing they might try.”
Reuters cybersecurity correspondent Sutter said the African Union was briefed by Japan’s Computer Emergency Response Team on Jan. 17, 2020. Prior to that, Japan’s Computer Emergency Response Team found unusually active data traffic between the African Union and a Chinese hacker group nicknamed Bronze President. African Union technicians then began to trace the source of the activity.
When they investigated, they found that a set of servers in an African Union annex building were being linked to a Web site associated with this Chinese hacker group,” Sutter told Voice of America, “and that these servers were transmitting surveillance footage to this Web site. This means that cameras in all African Union buildings are transmitting footage to hackers overseas.”
China denies reports
Voice of America contacted African Union spokesman Ebba Kalondo, but did not receive a response. Moussa Faki, chairman of the African Union Commission, previously denied any Chinese hacking had taken place.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a Dec. 21 press conference that the Reuters report was an attempt to harm relations between China and Africa.
He said, “China-Africa cooperation will not be affected by noise, and China-Africa friendship will not be diluted by untrue information.”
Sutter said the African Union is trying to figure out that information was stolen, but may not get the full picture.
Sutter said, “It’s not just the African Union, but a lot of organizations face the problem of trying to estimate what these bad guys got when hackers break in. I think that’s the case with the African Union, they just don’t know.”
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