Thumb drives are so inconsistently manufactured it is all but impossible to know if any unit could be reprogrammed to own computers, researcher Karsten Nohl says.

The conditions that determined if a unit could be hacked varied not only between vendors but also within product unit lines due to manufacturers buying different hardware components due to fluctuating prices.

In a presentation (slides) at the recent PacSec conference in Japan, Nohl and fellow SRLabs researchers Sasha Kribler and Jakob Lell revealed more information into the attacks known as BadUSB.

[theregister.co.uk...]
I keep USB thumb drives to a minimum, but it appears that nearly all USB peripherals are subject to reprogramming by baddies.