> I would think that the different national intelligence agencies would have high interest in infiltrating such companies.

I bet in general non-governmental companies, especially with distributed offices, distributed sales teams, are especially easy to hack/infiltrate.

But NSO Group's target has never been other countries, it has been focused on helping governments infiltrate their citizen's and opponent's phones, which is a much softer target.

It's quite clever actually, why spend resources to try and infiltrate them - which is not a guarantee, when you can pay a fraction of the cost for their capabilities so you can focus your efforts on other nation states or your own citizens.

Good point: I think the cost of buying the service is much lower than the cost of any covert operations or infiltration. (This is a pure guess.)