In the ball, which Putin gave to Trump, found the transmitter
Last week, a gift from Russian President Vladimir Putin - a soccer ball - to US President Donald Trump called a barrage of warnings. Some of the politicians joked that they could listen to a souvenir from the World Cup. Republican Senator Lindsay Graham even wrote on Twitter: "I would check for an audition soccer ball and never allow it in the White House."
It turns out that they were not mistaken. Marking on the ball indicates that it has a chip with a tiny antenna that transmits a signal to neighboring phones, writes Bloomber.
However, the chip was not a spy device, but an adidas AG ball advertising function.
Photos from the press conference in Helsinki, where Putin handed the ball to Trump, show that he has a logo for the tag. During production, the NFC chip is placed inside the ball under this logo, which resembles the icon for a Wi-Fi signal, according to the Adidas website.
The chip allows fans to access player videos, contests, and other content while putting mobile devices to the ball. This feature is included in the ball of the 2018 World Cup match of the year, which is sold on the Adidas website for $ 165 US dollars (last week it fell to 83 dollars).
Adidas declined to comment on whether the chip could be used by Russian hackers. There is no suggestion that such balls or their chips have security vulnerabilities. The chip itself cannot be modified according to the product description on the Adidas website. “It is not possible to delete or overwrite encoded settings,” the message says.
While the logo advertised the presence of the chip, it was impossible to determine in the photographs whether the chip could be removed, replaced by the actual spy mechanism, or, more remotely, whether the ball was made for the game, or only resembled the Adidas model.
“The security screening process that all gifts go through was conducted on a football,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in an email. “We will not be commenting further on security procedures.” The White House declined to say whether any changes were found to the ball or where the ball would be located in the future.
The chip is the same technology used in some contactless payments, including Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Theoretically, such tags can be programmed to initiate an attack on the phone. In 2015, Forbes reported that the engineer used the NFC chip to send a nearby Android phone request to open a link, which, if the user agreed to open it, installed the malicious file and controlled the phone.
Nevertheless, such a multi-stage attack through a football seems unlikely, said Linus Neumann, a representative of the Hamburg Computer Club of Chaos, a hacker team who for decades revealed weaknesses in Germany’s banking, government and other computer systems.
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