I found this article over on hackaday.com. Thought you would find it interesting.
https://hackaday.com/2017/04/08/brickerbot-takes-down-your-iot-devices-permanently/
Michael
While this is interesting and destructive at the same time, we are lucky that the Particle devices are embedded devices and wiping the firmware remotely isn’t that trivial. 
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Another reason Linux is not quite ready to iot prime time.
I was thinking about that the other day.
If you are using a 3rd party SIM and the firmware corrupts or is maliciously damaged resulting in the APN settings being removed, how would one be able to re-flash the device remotely? :\