As an electrical engineer - I think incidents like these are a pretty solid argument for incorporating overvoltage protection into 5V USB peripherals.
Even something as simple as a zener clamp with a polyfuse to make a dead-simple crowbar circuit will save a device and won't contribute a whole lot to BOM cost.
Even something as simple as a zener clamp with a polyfuse to make a dead-simple crowbar circuit will save a device and won't contribute a whole lot to BOM cost.