Yeah so targeting individuals or specific organisations is pretty hard. It sounds dumb but how do you get someone’s phone number if they don’t give it to you? Its hard unless you’re determined tbh which most people aren’t.

Most hackers setup watering hole style attacks, or use phishing which is roughly the same concept. Basically they cast a wide net and see what they can grab, like the browser credentials of Debra from accounting who knows everything about compound interest and nothing about opening an .exe file in an email. There are some big game hunting groups, and the LinkedIn breach made some waves (see the fappening), but your run of the mill discord-as-a-c2 style hacker isn’t going after rich people.

Someone “hacking a phone” likely put a kitchen scale iPhone app on the app store, which when first opened asks for permissions for microphone, camera, text messages, contacts and file storage, and sends all that information to Argentina for a week or so until their app gets banned.

Also, the most likely person to hack your phone seems to be someone in your household, abusive parent or spouse sorta thing. Most common devices to get hacked are laptops, usually windows. Its just kinda hard to hack a phone. Unless you know a lot about compressed image formats and the iPhone messages app apparently because NSO made like 5 zero days in a row out of that.