Sure, but “internal bounties have fundamental problems of incentives at any scale” is a different problem than “Apple can't afford internal bounties on an adequate scale to compete with nation-state attackers”.
Unit 8200 is single largest Israeli military unit, their entire tech industry is filled with 82xx, 81xx and 99xx alumni.
This is what happens when you have universal conscription and the intelligence corps get their pick of the brightest conscripts.
It still doesn’t make them a state actor anymore than the dozen or so European malware vendors and the probably far more numerous US ones and that is before looking into the defense sector proper.
> NSO Group is a subsidiary of the Q Cyber Technologies group of companies.[7] Q Cyber Technologies is the name the NSO Group uses in Israel, but the company goes by OSY Technologies in Luxembourg, and in North America, a subsidiary formerly known as Westbridge. It has operated through various other companies around the world.[18]
