Should I be concerned with newly jumpdrive from China?

[bpat 0]

Hi, I am new to this forum.  I have purchased a Lexar jumpdrive today, and, after bringing it home, I noticed in small print that Lexar is an affiliate of Longsys, a Chinese company.  Should I be concerned?  I looked on the VirusRadar map, and China has a very high incidence of viruses.  Plus, we hear about hacking from China and Russia.  Could there be hidden software on this drive?
Should I take extra measures, such as formatting it, or requiring an Eset scan on it before I do anything else?
 

[itman 954]

If the Chinese wanted to embed something on the drive, they would do so in the drive firmware at manufacturing time. Ref.: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-check-your-usb-devices-for-unsafe-firmware-1841773522

As a rule, I reformat new USB drives primarily to get rid of any crud utilities the manufacture's love to load on these drives. Also, to set the drive to NTFS format which is more secure than the default FAT32 format.

Edited October 20, 2020 by itman