tl;dr: you seem to inflated facts, blown a story out of proportions by a few orders of magnitude, turning a relatively small event of “may happen” nature to a distorted, grotesque vision of the reality where “may” was replaced with “always”. Which is false and harmful to OP.
Yes, it did. But what you said is not that Stuxnet exists. Not even that there exist malware that is being spread on pendrives. Not even about a possible, though complicated and expensive attacks using specially crafted USB sticks. For that I would not ask for sources, considering that I have already covered those in my own answer.
You made a claim, extreme in its nature, about arbitrary USB sticks being inherently dangerous to use, that they run (magically by themselves!) hidden executables, collect data and send them to servers. Drawing a picture that implies they shouldn’t be used at all, and either pretending that’s authoritative information or shutting off criticism by adding that “everybody educated in IT” would support that.
To start with, this is a universal quantification style statement. For that you can’t link a source that gives existential quantification. Even worse, a source that is referring to events that are mostly historical, while your claim is in present tense.
So I am asking, again: provide sources that confirm the statement you have actually made. Not something that matches some random words from it. Otherwise stop spreading misinformation. Feringdon is clueless enough, already fell victim to people spreading similar bullshit and by making such frivolous claims you are hurting them even more. I will not make guesses, what motivates you to do that, but perhaps think twice about the harm you are causing.
No, there is no inherent risk associated specifically with that technology. USB sticks in your control do not come from factory preloaded with malware to steal data from your system and send it to three letter agencies. There is no “everyone educated in IT knows” style knowledge about such a thing. Using pendrives
may cause risk, just like anything else may: that happens for very specific reasons and in particular circumstances, not by default.
The full explanation is above. You are free to disagree and address concrete points, in case I conveyed invalid information.