The most telling element of the video, Wikoff says, is the speed the hacker demonstrates in exfiltrating the accounts' information in real-time. The Google account's data is stolen in around four minutes. The Yahoo account takes less than three minutes. In both cases, of course, a real account populated with tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data would take far longer to download. But the clips demonstrate how quickly that download process is set up, Wikoff says, and suggest that the hackers are likely carrying out this sort of personal data theft on a mass scale. "To see how adept they are at going in and out of all these different webmail accounts and setting them up to exfiltrate, it is just amazing," says Wikoff. "It’s a well-oiled machine."
In some cases, IBM's researchers could see in the video that the same dummy accounts were also themselves being used to send phishing emails, with bounced emails to invalid addresses appearing in the accounts' inboxes. The researchers say those bounced emails revealed some of the APT35 hackers' targeting, including American State Department staff as well as an Iranian-American philanthropist. It's not clear if either target was successfully phished. The dummy Yahoo account also briefly shows the phone number linked with it, which begins with Iran's +98 country code.
In other videos the IBM researchers declined to show to WIRED, the researchers say the hackers appeared to be combing through and exfiltrating data from real victims' accounts, rather than ones they created for training purposes. One victim was a member of the US Navy, and another was a two-decade veteran of the Greek Navy. The researchers say the APT35 hackers appear to have stolen photos, emails, tax records, and other personal information from both targeted individuals.
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