Austin PD warns that the official-looking QR codes on city parking meters might not be so official after all.
Those QR codes—that stands for “quick response,” by the way—are ubiquitous these days. The small 2D square mazes of black and white pixels can carry up to 4 kilobytes of data . They were invented in the 1990s in Japan by Toyota subsidiaryto track parts and components during the vehicle manufacturing process. Since then, variants of QR codes have circulated around the world. In these QR codes, “you can embed anything you want.
They’ve actually had slow growth, despite being around for a while. When smartphones blew up, they became more popular. “It used to be the case that you had to download a special app that would use your camera to read these things,” Hong says, but now, most smartphones have built-in software that will translate the camera scan into a link that will load through the web browser.
But in most cases, like with instruction manuals or menus, this probably won’t be an issue. “There’s no sensitive data that they would retrieve from you, there’s also no easy way for a scammer to get their QR code onto the instruction manual,” Hong says.in how they trick their marks into clicking on bad links. And they’re opportunistic when it comes to low effort, high reward scores.and create a fake website that looks legitimate, says Hong.
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