> But have any of these extreme exploits ever been used in the wild?

I suspect you're going to find out in 50 years when government documents (not inherently US gov) are declassified.

State level spying is the only thing I can think of where the value of the information is so high (making the effort of this kind of attack is worth it) and where there are many scenarios where the volume of highly valuable information is comparatively tiny.

Just as some very off the cuff examples of what I mean by the latter. We don't need to exfiltrate satellite photos of things (gigabytes of data), but, it could be very valuable to exfiltrate the metadata of what they are looking at (coordinates and time)

Also, exfiltrating information like names of sources or meeting points or other methods can be trivial amounts of data but finding even a single compromised person on our side would be immensely valuable!

I'm reminded of "The Thing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%...