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USB worm unleashed by Russian state hackers spreads worldwide
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Sure. Even regularly installing a new OS doesn't necessarily keep you secure if someone wanted to discreetly install malware on your device. In addition to firmware-level rootkits that re-install themselves on fresh OSs (even platform-agnostic ones), it's possible that someone might interdict whatever hardware is bought and implant it with additional small hardware that compromises it in some way.
They don't even need to work that hard, just compromise the ME/PSP and do whatever.