I'm all in for VM based privilege separation, but that won't protect you from infected endpoint. Assuming this was a targeted attack, folks that achieved RCE on DevOp engineer's machine could have waited for her to authenticate and then inject keystrokes into VM, SSH, VNC, Remote Desktop, Citrix or whatever remote management system they're using.

Honestly, this HN thread is full of bad advice and factually incorrect patronizing. Okta-style system asking to accept every single permission would not have protected from an attack, because Okta caches and reuses authentication tokens. Clipboard snooping / keylogger detection wouldn't have worked because none of these solutions are robust against targeted attacks.

The only thing I can think of which would have (and should have) helped is alert SOC / incident reponse team. Good luck finding one though.