Neither
"could be caused by either faulty hardware, the unreliable installation of software, or software conflicts,"
Neither. Just standard issue with new DELL laptops circa 2016. The new Intel CPUs Dell put in at the time were triggering latent races in a lot of different software.
We had a race in our java based stuff which I could never ever trigger on anything else and was not triggered for years on anything from a small single core to multi-core monsters either bare metal or virtualized. The new 2016 edition HELL laptops were triggering it with 50% probability.
I bet that some piece of software she was using had a similar latent race.
She is born to be a security professional by the look of it though. She immediately blamed it on an intrusion. Paranoia reigns supreme...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
