Sometimes your paranoia is justified! You may remember this story from 2015 about the NSA installing backdoors into the firmware of hard drives that would not be easily removed. So you may already have reasons to be skeptical of your hardware. Well rmcybernetics has a great writeup here about discovering malware on a machine they purchased on aliexpress and had the ability to infect any USB device that was connected to it. Great food for thought on where you source your hardware from and how much you decide to trust it right out of the box.