The article admits this explicitly:

>Malicious hardware has plenty of precedent: it’s been used by intelligence agencies and private pentesters alike. Heck, a bit over a decade ago, I built an evil plasma globe for work. Still, we weren’t here to debate whether a malicious RJ45-to-USB adapter could be made. The important question was whether in this particular instance — as the poster put it — “the Chinese were at it again”.

Yeah, I found the link to the evil plasma globe ( https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/plasma_globe/ ) to be a more interesting read than the article itself.

Not to mention the evil ethernet patch cable:

https://imgur.com/Gpgj7w7

Ah, it's the Etherkiller prank from the good old days. http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/