Old, but increasingly us, these codes are nothing more than alphanumeric information “translat” into a two-dimensional image; their use brings practicality, but it is necessary to adopt some precautions.
QR Codes: what are they, how do they work and what are their dangers?
It’s practically impossible that, over the last few years
you haven’t come across a single QR Code at some point in your life. We’re talking about those two-dimensional images, form by three large cubes on the ends and a series of smaller squares inside. When read by a smartphone, they can reveal a link to a web page or start the download of other content to be consum on your mobile device, for example.
First of all, it’s worth mentioning shadow making that this isn’t a new technology — it was creat in 1994 by Masahiro Hara, an employee of Denso Wave, a Japanese industrial automation company that is part of the Toyota Group. Initially, QR codes (which stands for Quick Response ) were design exclusively for industrial use, as a more modern standard for cataloging automotive components compar to good old traditional barcodes.
Masahiro’s idea was to create an information decoding protocol that could carry a larger amount of data and that could be read more easily, since the standards adopt in the industry until then were quite limit: they requir a specific scanner to be interpret and could only be scann horizontally. QR Codes, on the other hand, were much more flexible, and Denso Wave soon realiz that even a low-resolution camera on a cell phone could read them.
Practical but dangerous
However, QR Codes have never been us so extensively before. After the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) crisis, many restaurants, in order to avoid the circulation of physical leaflets, began to make their menus available digitally. To access them, the customer had to scan a code, which was usually stuck to the table. The new payment method of the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB), PIX, also help to popularize QR codes, which are us to spe up the transfer of funds between accounts.
The problem is that, nowadays, anyone can create
a QR Code in a matter of seconds using free tools available on the web — and that includes cybercriminals. Realizing that the technology has become widely PIM மென்பொருள்: 2024க்கான சிறந்த 4 PIM தீர்வுகள் adopt by internet users, cybercriminals wast no time in circulating malicious codes that can take you to a phishing page or even force the automatic download of malware onto your phone.
Furthermore, due to their high data storage capacity — which is much greater than that of regular barcodes — QR Codes can store Uniform Resource Identifiers ( URIs ). URIs are a kind of “command” that makes your smartphone respond according to the ne, including america email list transmitting your geolocation via an app, sending an SMS or even adding a contact to your address book.
