States have crazy amounts of resources and they are not worried about their return on investment the same way other actors are. If a hacker wants to scam peopl

States have crazy amounts of resources and they are not worried about their return on investment the same way other actors are. If a hacker wants to scam people out of their savings they have a limit on how much money they can potentially earn. I don’t know what the actual numbers are, but let’s say an attacker can hope to extract 100k USD from one in every 10k prospect. If those are the numbers then the attacker can’t waste more than 10 dollar on any individual targets on average or they would start loosing money. I suspect the real numbers are even worse. On the other hand if you work for a state and you burn a few billion dollars to research some zero day vulnerabilities which you then use to delay the weapons development of your adversaries by a few months you get a medal. Or maybe you don’t but one thing is for sure the state won’t collapse just because of this. What does it mean in practice. Imagine a scenairo where you left your smart phone at the side of your bed for the duration of a bathroom trip. You return and you look at your phone. Can you trust that the phone on the side of your table is the same you had earlier? It is absolutely 100% sure that the would-be-savings-scammer doesn’t have the resources to camp outside of your bedroom, monitor your comings and goings, sneak in when you leave the room, swap your phone and leave unnoticed. An operation like that costs serious money. But if a state put in their collective head that their national interest is best served by your phone being swapped then the above can and will happen. They have the resources to do it and they don’t care about “ROI” in a traditional sense. Now will a state actor sneak in to your bedroom? Probably not, because there are lower hanging fruits to achieve the same cheaper. For example by paying a batalion of nerds to find zero day exploits in complicated software. The thing about states is that they are higly uneven. One can have slow and inneficient burocracy and crumbling infrastructure and failing healthcare yet still pursue some other goal with dodged persistance. And the truth is if someone decides to spend a billion dollar to hurt you you will be hurt, if they decide to spend a billion dollar to know your secrets your secrets will be known. States can be both bumbling idiots and godlike entities at the same time, maybe even in the same building.