You run a VM just to inspect "sketchy-looking links"? That sounds like paranoid behavior, if I'm being honest.
This place would be one of the best to hit with a 0day. Lots of IT people with full admin rights to entire corporate networks.
Users at XYZ.gov gets the 0day, everyone else gets what is expected.
When a link can compromise an entire machine, having a machine you can literally throw away with no consequence is nice.
Hell, I'd wager to say that containers wouldn't be a thing if it weren't for this kind of behavior. Looking for ways to build up and destroy VMs even faster.
https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/system/i386/microvm.ht... https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/
Or maybe people just have temp VMs running anyway, and like others have said, if you’re browsing hacker news on your work machine you should probably do so with a healthy dose of paranoia.