Wow yikes! On the one hand -- it's obviously a bad idea to use your current employer's laptop for a job interview.
But social engineering takes many forms and anyone could be suseptible.
Do we need to start carrying liability insurance (like doctors do)? There are so many hazards these days working in tech which can cause you to be liable for huge amounts of damage. Using agents seems fraught too; they can easily go "off the rails" and take actions you didn't intend.
Yeah. Pretty wild. I've never done that, and wouldn't, but I know folks who would. If I ever do any interview work on my laptop, it's always sandboxed, but generally, I just nope out of such interviews, anyway. It's usually one of many red flags.
It does seem like there has been an increase in that social engineering approach. The Rust ecosystem was being targeted recently too, enough that they felt the need to warn people about it: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/17/targeted-attacks/
Multiple wtfs: one dev can access 6B; the dev does job interview from the work laptop; the work laptop has permission to run random executables with it having access to sensitive stuff. Maybe they went on to hack into stuff from the dev's laptop that they should not have had access to.
Wow yikes! On the one hand -- it's obviously a bad idea to use your current employer's laptop for a job interview.
But social engineering takes many forms and anyone could be suseptible.
Do we need to start carrying liability insurance (like doctors do)? There are so many hazards these days working in tech which can cause you to be liable for huge amounts of damage. Using agents seems fraught too; they can easily go "off the rails" and take actions you didn't intend.
Contractors in the UK are already required to have liability insurance, or any large business won't touch them with a barge pole.
Yeah. Pretty wild. I've never done that, and wouldn't, but I know folks who would. If I ever do any interview work on my laptop, it's always sandboxed, but generally, I just nope out of such interviews, anyway. It's usually one of many red flags.
It does seem like there has been an increase in that social engineering approach. The Rust ecosystem was being targeted recently too, enough that they felt the need to warn people about it: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/09/17/targeted-attacks/
This a known method now of social engineering. See this post from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45591707
Still crazy tho that one dev's compromised device could withdraw 6 billion...
Multiple wtfs: one dev can access 6B; the dev does job interview from the work laptop; the work laptop has permission to run random executables with it having access to sensitive stuff. Maybe they went on to hack into stuff from the dev's laptop that they should not have had access to.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50353353