You could even combine the two. Post the blog to hacker news, then send phishing email pointing to HN post. That is a trusted link. Then the user will likely click the source link in HN.

Obviously, a lot harder and lower chance of success, but not impossible.

In general maybe, in this particular case it's gonna be challenging however, as gitlab is a remote company so most employees will logon from residential ips

My present employer's VPN client goes a step further and mangles the routing table to deny access to my own LAN while connected.

I guess they both suck pretty hard.

it was always only the 10.0.0.0/8 and some /24 ranges from 192.168.0.0/16 at my current job

You definitely could perform a watering hole attack if you compromised a site that always gets on the front page of HN. If I were an evil hacker and I wanted to compromise HN I would instead attack a site like rachelbythebay.com or some other popular blogger then just wait for HN’ers to click the link.

(Myself included)

"Why rust is not a real programming language"

"It's a complete waste of time to learn C++ in 2020"

"Rust is 2x as fast as C++"

And then just point to an article about Rust the game.

Jokes aside, I love the name, the pun is nice, but man it makes searching a pain. I’ve ended up too many times in pages related to the game or to actual rust (as in iron).

Not a phishing attempt, I swear!

And you do by a really invasive means that will make sure that everybody that knows what they are doing but are curious to safely inspect it further will be marked as clueless. Leading to false positive and negative errors larger than the signal, but you still expect to get useful data from it.

Then someone will point out watering hole attacks, where adversaries find where targets hang out socially, and attack that.

And then I'll point out that the inherent risk in HN links vs. unfamiliar emails are very different.