I remember in the mid-90s going to an interview in Manhattan - pre-Internet. Someone met me and led me to a table and said, "Here's where you're going to take your test." I said, "I don't take tests." She said "Everyone that comes in takes the test". I said, "Well, that's no longer true because I came in and I'm leaving without taking the test"

This is what I was trying to figure out. Did they think it was for an internal role or something?

Probably. I have seen many colleagues across the cubicle aisles spending their time on things completely unrelated to their work. I would be baffled to hear that you have not had similar experiences.

Absolutely. Yet as a hiring manager, I see it all the time.

Not as easy as that, these can be real people with genuine businesses across the other side of the world, which sounds like what happened here. They only have to seem friendly and genuine before asking you to perform a coding test or whatever.

Unfortunately:

1) The dev downloaded it onto a work laptop which was really poor behaviour

2) It sounds like the developer environment was very open instead of segmented. Common but an easy control to use in a high-risk environment.

3) Sounds like a lack of any elevation process e.g. if a developer needed to access a wallet, it very much should sound an alarm/require explicit permission etc.

But it is easy to be wise in hindsight.

Pretty lame of The Register not to reference the original source.

lol maybe the employees wanted the company to see it.

Well so-rry but if you gave me a macbook powerful enough to play cyberpunk 2077 on it, that's what I'm gonna do.