Combating QR Code Phishing (Quishing): Why Modern Mail Filters Get Blinded
Explaining the explosion of QR code lures in corporate inboxes and the optical character recognition (OCR) defenses needed to inspect embedded URLs.
Why Attackers Love QR Codes
Traditional Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) inspect text strings and hyperlinks embedded in HTML bodies. By embedding the malicious URL into an image as a QR code, attackers bypass legacy link extraction and URL reputation checks entirely.
The User Psychological Trap
Employees scanning QR codes on their personal mobile devices transfer the browsing session outside corporate endpoint monitoring, web filtering, and enterprise browser controls, leading directly to simulated Microsoft 365 credential-harvesting portals.
Defensive Solutions: Computer Vision and OCR Inspection
Next-generation API-based email defenses utilize optical character recognition and computer vision to extract QR codes in real time, decode their payload URLs, and submit the destination addresses to sandbox detonation engines before email delivery.
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