Operation Red Echo: China-linked hackers extend their reach into African government networks

In a growing sign of cyber power projection, the China-backed hacking group APT41 has expanded its operations to target public sector infrastructure across multiple African nations. This campaign, discovered in early July 2025, blends classic espionage tactics with stealthy data exfiltration tools—signaling both strategic intent and technical evolution.

APT41, long considered one of the most active and versatile threat actors tied to China’s state apparatus, is no stranger to cyber espionage. Known for campaigns ranging from intellectual property theft in the U.S. to surveillance operations in Southeast Asia, the group is now shifting focus to regions undergoing rapid digital transformation—where defense maturity may lag behind exposure.

Why Africa?

The continent has become a hotbed for digital investment, infrastructure development, and geopolitical courtship. Chinese companies play a growing role in Africa’s telecommunications, smart city planning, and national cloud projects. It’s no surprise that intelligence gathering would follow. The latest wave of attacks appears aimed not at disruption, but quiet infiltration and long-term access.

Sources close to the investigation believe that APT41 is particularly interested in ministries of finance, foreign affairs, and telecommunications across targeted nations. One analyst familiar with the case described the operation as “surgical, persistent, and built for sustained presence.”

Technical breakdown: Anatomy of the attack

APT41’s campaign involves a multi-stage intrusion with custom tooling and covert exfiltration channels.

Initial access

• Exploitation of public-facing applications and misconfigured servers
• Use of phishing emails with government-themed lures (e.g., invoice PDFs, meeting invites)

Credential harvesting

• Deployment of tailored stealers to extract Windows credentials
• Use of LSASS memory scraping to retrieve NTLM hashes and cleartext passwords
• Targeted credential dumps from service accounts and domain controllers

Data exfiltration via SharePoint

• Stolen data was uploaded to attacker-controlled SharePoint servers
• Use of legitimate SharePoint APIs to evade detection
• Obfuscation of payloads with benign filenames (e.g., minutes.docx, contracts.pdf)

Persistence and lateral movement

• Custom scheduled tasks and DLL sideloading techniques
• Internal scanning for connected subnets to expand access silently

Implications

APT41’s operations are more than isolated breaches—they’re part of a larger geostrategic playbook. By infiltrating African IT ministries, attackers gain access to sensitive communications, international negotiations, and the digital spine of future state infrastructure.

Furthermore, their use of cloud-based exfiltration (SharePoint) reflects a growing trend: adversaries turning trusted platforms into covert data highways. It’s a method that bypasses many traditional firewalls and raises the bar for detection.

Cybersecurity experts warn that this pattern may soon appear in Latin America and Eastern Europe, where similar digital investment by Chinese firms is underway.

What you should do

Organizations in government, telecom, and cloud services should:

• Monitor outbound traffic to SaaS platforms like SharePoint and Dropbox
• Audit credentials regularly and enable MFA across privileged accounts
• Deploy endpoint detection systems capable of identifying credential theft behavior
• Conduct red team simulations focused on lateral movement within hybrid environments

APT41 is not just adapting to global targets—they are embedding themselves in tomorrow’s power structures. Their campaign in Africa may be the first glimpse of a broader doctrine: one where digital espionage becomes the quiet twin of foreign diplomacy.