Though QR codes were once on the verge of extinction, many consumers are used to seeing them in the wild for ordering at restaurants, or as mainstays on storefront doors informing customers how they can sign up for a newsletter or score a sweet deal.
The use of QR codes saw a resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic as a non-contact way for consumers to obtain important information. And as they’ve become more prevalent, attackers have taken notice, too, increasingly deploying them in phishing and email-based attacks.
There was a significant increase in QR code phishing in 2023, according to public reporting and recently collected data from Cisco Talos Incident Response (Talos IR).
As highlighted in our latest Quarterly Trends report, Talos IR responded to a QR code phishing campaign for the first time in an engagement in the fourth quarter of 2023, where threat actors tricked victims into scanning malicious QR codes embedded in phishing emails with their personal mobile devices, thereby leading to malware being executed on the mobile devices.
In a separate attack, the adversaries sent targets spear-phishing emails with malicious QR codes pointing to fake Microsoft Office 365 login pages that eventually steal the user’s login credentials when entered.
QR code attacks are particularly dangerous because they move the attack vector off a protected computer and onto the target’s personal mobile device, which usually has fewer security protections in place and ultimately has the sensitive information that attackers are after.
How is a QR code lure different from a traditional malicious attachment or link?
“Traditional” phishing attacks usually involve an adversary writing a highly targeted email hoping to trick a user into op ..
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