What's so fanciful about it? We know that remote exploits exist. We know that cellphones have very complex baseband processors which used to have arbitrary memory access and while they've reported been locked down it's not like there hasn't been an arms race finding ways around every other security measure. We don't need any technological breakthroughs to posit that past remote exploits were not the only ones possible.
This is the problem with things like this or the Bloomberg server story: the capabilities are plausible but there's not enough information to know whether or not they're actually true so you're in the position of having to guess about whether someone actually could implement that attack and whether they'd chose to spend that much money.
This is the problem with things like this or the Bloomberg server story: the capabilities are plausible but there's not enough information to know whether or not they're actually true so you're in the position of having to guess about whether someone actually could implement that attack and whether they'd chose to spend that much money.