You're thinking too small.

Yes, stealing individual secrets is best done with old school tradecraft. Spies in suits, photos of scandals with dominatrixes.

But what if you want build a system which can identify homosexuals based on textual conversations? You buy Grindr.

Or what if you want to get a backdoor for future exploitation on almost every computer in the US? You buy Fortnite. Because one of those computers will belong to the child of someone important. It only takes one slip by them to get Stuxnet from their home PC to their work PC.

You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger darling.

You don't need to buy a company to use its systems in an attack. The odds of discovery and disclosure ahead of time increase massively if you go through a major company's decision making processs as part of your hacking process. Companies are people. Lots of them. They are consequently not good at keeping secrets, particularly "I'm hacking the world for evil" secrets.

Ah yes, brave and valiant humans who took 12 years to blow the whistle on PRISM.

I shouldn't have mentioned attack vectors, the first case is the better opportunity these days. Data data data.

> Yes, stealing individual secrets is best done with old school tradecraft. Spies in suits, photos of scandals with dominatrixes.

Why would anybody need to do more than steal individual secrets they've been told to recon?

Because you can't build a homosexual scoring model for the social credit system by learning that one person is secretly gay.

You can build that model if you have access to the data of 20 million people.

Even easier / party not connected to the above hacks the anti-cheat software. No need to buy the company. Probably already has happened.

But also easy to revoke. If you own the code, you don't have to let anyone know what you're sneaking in.