QR Codes have become a de-facto standard of the advertising and packaging industry. Anything you pick up in your local grocery shop, or in a large mall, has a QR code printed somewhere on it. When you do online shopping on Amazon or eBay, they send the items with QR codes of various types printed all over the packages. Private couriers and USPS are extensively using QR codes and now you would hardly find any advertisement in a daily newspaper without any QR codes. With so many QR codes around you, there are crooks who can slip in malicious QR codes in public banners, web sites and advertisements that can install harmful apps in your mobile phones. Then there are those pranksters who can display objectionable web sites disguised inside QR codes.
This is why you need a QR code scanner that not only decodes the QR code, but can also find out whether the data contained inside those codes is safe for you or not. We have previously posted about Kaspersky QR Code Scanner app for Android phones. Now there is another trustworthy app called CM QR Code Scanner that can scan QR Codes and warn you if they contain malicious, harmful or undesirable data or links.
As you would expect, the CM QR Code Scanner app works only when there is internet connection present in your Android phone. The app sends the data inside the QR code to the CM Security servers to find out if it is safe. If there is no internet present, then a message – “Security Check failed”, appears on your screen.
You can use Wi-Fi or 3G/4G data connection and then re-scan the QR code. If the QR code contains a link and the website is safe to browse, a message “Safe Webpage” is displayed along with an option to “Open” that web page in the default web browser.
But if the link inside the QR code points to a malicious or harmful web site, then a warning is displayed in the red color. Similarly, a warning is issued in orange color about other objectionable links contained inside the QR codes. However, you can still open the web page in spite of the warnings. It would have been better if CM QRCode could completely block the malicious links embedded in the QR codes.
You can get the CM QR Code Scanner app for Android from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cleanmaster.security_qrcode&hl=en.