My hunch is that this was partly an inside job. The "fake job interview" and "mistakenly downloaded trojaned homebrew" stories are to give plausible deniability. But they're not very plausible imho.

They are very plausible though. There are so many fake job interview scams right now thats its insane. I've personally come across multiple that ive noticed, who knows if there are any that I didnt.

A very recent one wanted me to download an executable which was to "stop me from cheating with AI", which was clearly fake. I've had plenty of interviews where I was expected to clone, fix, and run a repo, which as far as I can tell, all were from legitimate companies. An illegitimate company could easy do the same process with malware.