Vladimir Putin marked the monumental Helsinki summit meeting with Donald Trump by giving his counterpart a World Cup football as a diplomatic gift.
When they exchanged greetings, Mr Putin joked to Mr Trump that “now the ball is in your court”.
Sceptics of the alliance between the two questioned what the purpose of the Russian gift could be, sparking wide-ranging speculation online.
Just hours after the joint press conference, South Carolina’s Republican Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted a warning: “If it were me, I’d check the soccer ball for listening devices and never allow it in the White House.”
Bloomberg later reported that a secret transmitter chip was in fact found inside the football, prompting huge concern.
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According to the report, the football was identified as possessing a “built-in chip with a tiny antenna”.
However, security expert Will Geddes told James Whale on talkRADIO that the story had been slightly “overexaggerated”.
He pointed out that all footballs from the Russian 2018 World Cup had been manufactured with a transmitter chip for promotional use.
Mr Geddes explained that Adidas, who sponsored the World Cup, implanted promotional chips inside footballs “to send nearby phones football results, advertising and football-related content”.
The security expert did admit that the chip, equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC), has been compromised in the past.
Mr Geddes told Whale that the chip could be hacked and tampered with by special hacking agents.
He explained: “The chip that’s in this football could have nefarious usages if it was tampered with.
“This NFC had been hacked previously in 2015 by a hacker who was able to connect to a nearby Android phone, not an iOS Apple phone, and was able to actually send, or in theory send, a malicious link to that particular android phone.”
He went onto say that US secret service would have screened the football before ever letting the object close to the President.
Mr Geddes added: Standard drills genuinely see the item passed to someone within the secret service detailed with protecting him Trump, who would’ve run it by their incumbent TSCM team which is their Technical Surveillance Counter Measures team.
“They would’ve checked it and made sure nothing was in it.”
Cybersecurity expert Scott Schober told CNN that a mobile device would have to be “within a couple of centimetres” of the ball to even interact with the chip.