The way this reads I think the company did not actually provide a good sandboxed environemt. So when they rm -rf /'d the thing they actually deleted a lot of stuff the recruiters still needed (likely the pentest environments for other candidates). Because imo that’s the only reason I can think of to just outright ban a candidate from applying for any other role at the company.
You should ban anyone who tries this regardless of the outcome. There is always a small chance they did it on purpose trying to cause damage. There is no benefit by giving them another chance, you just riks giving them the possibility of doing more damage. If the thing was a mistake, the person will learn from it and find another job.
If the task would have been to find general security risks this would have counted. I mean, he did some serious harm, but he was able to find a security issue.
I think there is kind of an assumption that the scenario is “outside host gains privileged access” so there’s not really a security issue with some attacker deleting root on their own box.
The way this reads I think the company did not actually provide a good sandboxed environemt. So when they
rm -rf /'d the thing they actually deleted a lot of stuff the recruiters still needed (likely the pentest environments for other candidates). Because imo that’s the only reason I can think of to just outright ban a candidate from applying for any other role at the company.You should ban anyone who tries this regardless of the outcome. There is always a small chance they did it on purpose trying to cause damage. There is no benefit by giving them another chance, you just riks giving them the possibility of doing more damage. If the thing was a mistake, the person will learn from it and find another job.
If the task would have been to find general security risks this would have counted. I mean, he did some serious harm, but he was able to find a security issue.
I think there is kind of an assumption that the scenario is “outside host gains privileged access” so there’s not really a security issue with some attacker deleting root on their own box.
If it has been done properly you’re right. If this also affected the host machine it is a security issue.