Should I be concerned about malware when buying a used (2017/2018) MBP?

[arkmannj]

Hello,

I recently purchased a used 2018 MacBook Pro off of eBay. It looks to be in good shape.
(other than the known gfx/display issue)

upon receiving the machine I went to boot into the recovery tools but it as it turns out there was no recovery partition. (this struck me as odd... does this possibly represent anything nefarious?)

So the next thing I did was update the OS, then downloaded the latest version of MacOS installer and created a bootable USB.
I booted off the USB, and used the recovery tools to format the internal drive, then reinstalled MacOS "fresh".

Should I have any concern about malware or bad actors?
I'm going to show my age here, but I remember it was an issue to get malware in the MBR of a hard drive that was rather nasty to try and get removed, and then there was little nasties that could affect a BIOS of the machine, to the firmware of a NIC, etc.
Are any of those kinds of things still reasonable concerns or am I out fishing in a lake of paranoia?

 

[Fishrrman]

Malwarebytes.

Free to download.
Free to use for 30 days.
At the end of the trial period, it will offer you the choice to either pay for registration
or
"convert" it to run free.

The difference is:
The paid version runs "full-time" in the background
whereas
The free version runs only when you launch it.

The free version is "good enough for me".

 

[BrianBaughn]

Formatting the drive did the trick…you should be clean at that point.

 

[arkmannj]

Thanks
I’ve installed MalwareBytes and Little-Snitch. so far, nothing from either of those looks out of the ordinary.