There's widespread exploitation of Apple devices around the world by many governments, companies, etc. Apple and Google downplay it. The attacks are often not at all targeted but rather you visit a web page involving a specific political movement such as Catalan independence and get exploited via Safari or Chrome. That's not a highly targeted attack and is a typical example of how those exploits get deployed. The idea that they're solely used against specific individuals targeted by governments is simply not true. Apple and Google know that's the case but lead people to believe otherwise to promote their products as more safe than they are.
> I think SEAR is extremely aware of what real-world exploitation of iPhones looks like.
Doesn't seem that way based on their interactions with Citizen Lab and others.
It's often external parties finding exploits being used in the wild and reporting it to Apple and Google. Citizen Lab, Amnesty International, etc.
We regularly receive info from people working at or previously working at companies developing exploits and especially from people at organization using those exploits. A lot of our perspective on it is based on having documentation on capabilities, technical documents, etc. from this over a long period of time. Sometimes we even get access to outdated exploit code. It's major releases bringing lots of code churn, replaced components and new mitigations which seem to regularly break exploits rather than security patches. A lot of the vulnerabilities keep working for years and then suddenly the component they exploited was rewritten so it doesn't work anymore. There's not as much pressure on them to develop new exploits regularly as people seem to think.
My impression is that Apple's threat intelligence effort is similar in quality to Google's. Of course external parties also help but Apple also independently finds chains sometimes.