In case you haven't heard yet, there's a word to add to your computer vocabulary along with "scamming," "spoofing," and "phishing."
"Quishing" is when a hacker takes over use of one of those little square boxes with ink-like marks all through them and small squares in the corners -- those boxes are called "QR Codes."
You're encouraged to frame the box in your cellphone camera and click, and you're taken to a website, an action often used by restaurants.
But it's when you click on a QR Code in order to pay for your dinner that you could cause big trouble for your bank account, as an example.
Hackers can control QR boxes, and if you click on one and use it to pay your dinner bill, you'd be giving the hacker access to your credit card account.
"It's kind of like ATM skimming back in the day, right? If you looked really closely you could see there's something in the card slot.that was designed to take your information -- the QR code hack is very similar," according to cybersecurity expert Damien Fortune.
You'll get a clue about what's happening in a hack if you don't rush through the payment process if you're, say, snapping a QR code from your waiter or waitress to pay for dinner.
Snap the code and a little preview of where you're going should appear on your phone screen.
"But if the web URL preview pops up on the phone and it looks like something a little funky, then it's worth flagging down the waitress or the waiter to ask if this is actually what you should be using to pay your check," Fortune adds.
So many of the people who've been scammed by the QR code Quishing are in a hurry and not paying attention to the actions the code is demanding of their phones.
"Looking out for things that are trying to get you to act too quickly are a huge problem.
"A lot of these scams just fall apart if you take a few moments to watch closely and think about what you're doing -- but it really does take that second to think about it in order to catch the scams before they hit you -- and maybe rob you."
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