IT Blog

Thanks to the pandemic, QR codes have popped up on ad posters, restaurant tables, and billboards around the world, inviting people to scan them in order to view menus and marketing information without having to type a web address into their phones.

But clicking QR codes too hastily can risk bringing malware to your smartphone, cautions Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.).

“If someone just walked up to you on a street corner, you wouldn’t just take a thumb drive from them and plug it into your laptop,” he says.

S.T.O.P. has been placing flyers and signs advertising fake events like comedy shows, venue openings, and trivia nights around New York City, where S.T.O.P. is based, with each bearing a QR code. Hundreds of people have scanned the QR codes and visited associated websites, which S.T.O.P. set up to bear warnings about the dangers of loading unknown QR codes, Cahn says. Now, the group is…