2023-12-11 22:42:07
The American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has warned against QR codes that can be found almost everywhere, and which can often lead to dangerous links…
Imagine this scenario: you have just parked in a paid space. So you go to the parking meter, and there you find a QR code. You scan it, hoping you can pay for your parking space. But without knowing it, you have fallen into a trap: the code is just a sticker that has been placed there by hackers, and it is them to whom you have just paid the money…
This is the kind of scenario that the FTC, the United States Federal Trade Commission, is warning about in a publication on his blog. The case of the parking meter is just one example among many, and is not necessarily the most transposable in Belgium, where it is still rare to pay for parking spaces with a QR code. But other scams are much more universal. So, a great classic is for the hacker to send you a QR code by email or message, and convince you to scan it, typically with a relatively credible excuse (very often, a variation of “there is a problem”). with your account, please scan this QR code”).
And article du New York Times explains among other things that according to John Fokker, of the cybersecurity company Trellix, the latter has recorded no less than 60,000 attacks on QR codes, which makes it a particularly omnipresent scam.
So what can you do to protect yourself? Quite simply, you should take some basic precautions. First of all, do not scan a QR code that you receive in an email or message whose origin you do not know, especially if it contains a notion of urgency, and always check the URL to which the code takes you. And be careful, because scammers can create URLs that look very similar to what you’re used to.
A series of precautions that can make using a QR code a little useless, so if you are not in a situation of total trust, and you already know the site you are going to, it is probably more easy to get there directly.
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