Now-a-days, QR Codes are everywhere. They have become the telephone numbers of the early twentieth century. Pick any magazine or newspaper, visit websites, dine in your favorite restaurant or take a walk in the street, you are sure to find at least one QR code somewhere. Some of the diners are now using the QR codes to put you in the waiting list for the table – just scan the QR code from the diner’s door and you will be notified as soon as a table becomes available. While these QR codes are getting popular every day and finding use in our everyday life, some of the hackers and cyber criminals are posting malicious QR codes in both the online and offline world.
As soon as you scan these malicious QR codes using your smart phone, you are taken to a phishing or attack website. This can put your personal or financial data at risk, not to mention the possibility of malware infection. But you can stop such malicious QR codes easily using the Kaspersky QR Scanner app. This app is available both for the Android and the iOS based smart phones
All you have to do is instead of scanning a QR code with your usual QR scanner app, just scan it with the Kaspersky QR Scanner. This app comes with a flashlight of its own, so that you can scan the QR codes even in the dark. You can turn on the flashlight on or off by touching the flash icon on the top.
In the settings of the app, you can enable the sound and vibration. This sound and the vibration is played every time you scan a QR code successfully. You can point the camera a little closer to the QR code that you want to scan in such a way that it fits the small square on the screen.
If the QR code points to a malicious link, then you would see a warning message in red telling you that it is a “Dangerous link”. You are also given an option to open such a link anyway (not recommended unless you know that link to be okay). If the link is harmless, then you would be see the a preview of the link in the bottom half of the screen – you can click anywhere on the preview to open the links in your regular browser.
Conclusion: Kaspersky QR Scanner can protect you from malicious QR codes that purport to deceive you and redirect you to phishing and attack web sites. Such harmful QR codes are blocked before they are opened in your browser and stopped before they can cause any damage.
You can download the Kaspersky QR Scanner from http://www.kaspersky.com/qr-scanner.