African Union Headquarters In Addis Ababa

Network administrators at the AU headquarters in Ethiopia discovered the bugs sometimes in January 2017, five years after the monitoring started.The Chinese government built and fully equipped a 20-story building at the tune of $200 million which was opened for operations in 2012 as the African Union headquarters.No one knew that the building had been laced with hidden microphones and cameras that fed data to donated computers. These computers in turn relayed the collected data to servers located in Shanghai every evening at close of business.The network administrators at the headquarters raised an alarm after they noticed that the network was routinely transmitting large amounts of data after midnight. This was strange given the fact that the building was empty and with little or no activities at all.On further investigations they noticed that the data was being transmitted to unknown servers in China. This led to the building being swept for bugs and the microphones and cameras were discovered.The building has since been rid of all donated Chinese equipment and new ones installed. The Union declined a request from Chinese government operatives to help with the configurations.When reached out for comments, the Chinese embassy denied the allegations that it was spying on the African Union saying that such comments were absurd.It is such a shame what donations and loans can do. That the African Union blindly let a superpower to configure its network without supervision is sad and unbelievable. col