Tag: quick response codes

QR codes can be harmful when precautions aren’t taken

| January 15, 2013

qr codes cautionMobile marketers love these barcodes , but as consumers embrace them, unscrupulous efforts grow.

It’s difficult to open a magazine or a flyer, these days, without seeing QR codes in all of the adds, but just as their popularity grows, so does their attractiveness to unethical individuals who would take advantage of this opportunity to cause harm.

These little black and white codes may look simple enough, but they may now pose an underlying threat.

It took quite a while for consumers to start to feel the enthusiasm for QR codes that mobile marketers have felt from the start. This has meant that individuals who would seek to use them for harmful purposes have left them alone for quite some time. But as the scanning trend continues to grow, so have the hazards associated with the activity.

Malicious QR codes have started to pop up here and there now that the technology has become commonplace.

Though it is still rare for malicious QR codes to appear, they have started showing up on occasion, and their impact can be quite damaging. This is because there are far more mobile device users that have barcode scanners than there are those who have protection against the type of attack that a tainted scan could present.

QR codes are meant to make it easy to redirect a device user to an app or a website to provide information, generate a download, view a video, or even to help buy a product or make a charitable donation. However, when a permissive reader app has been used, even a seemingly harmless scan could place the user’s privacy at risk.

The most common strategy that is used in order to encourage malicious barcode scans is simply to place a sticker with the harmful code overtop of the legitimate square. Therefore, one of the best efforts that a device user can make to protect his or her security is simply to double check that the QR codes they scan are printed directly onto materials from companies that they trust, and aren’t printed onto a sticker. Downloading a scanner app with built in protection is also a highly recommended activity.

QR codes in picture frames give your guests wireless access

| December 31, 2012

qr codes picture frameHosts can share their network and password details with the quick scan of a barcode.

Among the most commonly requested pieces of information from hosts by their guests is the network name and password so that they can access the wireless internet, and QR codes have now been discovered as an ideal solution to this request in one simple scan.

A new mobile trend has arrived, in which hosts have been framing the barcodes and hanging them.

These unique QR codes have been pre-designed in order to allow party and house guests to be able to simply scan them in order to gain access to the wireless internet in the home. This is proving to be both convenient and practical in today’s society where people feel the need to be connected at every moment.

These QR codes are hung in frames that can be scanned by guests so that they can obtain the data they need.

The trick to taking advantage of these QR codes at a party is to hang them prominently in one of the main areas of the home, and to display them in spaces where guests have a tendency of stepping aside in order to check something online or reply to their emails. Before this option, guests were required to ask their hosts for the login information; a process that could be rather frustrating.

As today’s network passwords need to be rather complex, they are often combinations of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols, and they may or may not use any recognizable words. This can make the exchange of the information rather time consuming and impractical. However, when all it takes is a scan of QR codes, it simplifies the process immediately.

This trend was started by a single person, who posted their successes online. It caught on quickly over the holiday season until it became much more common to see them at the Christmas and New Year celebrations and other parties that were happening at that time of year. It didn’t take long for smartphone users to catch on and start scanning the QR codes to receive the connection they needed.