Avoid malware, use your Galaxy phone’s camera to scan QR codes!

It is 2021 and people are still infecting their smartphones with malware while trying to scan QR codes regularly. The latest such incident involves Barcode Scanner, a harmless Android app that turned into a malware injector in early December. Malwarebytes cybersecurity researchers estimate that the malicious update infected around ten million users before Google ultimately removed the app from the Play Store. While it’s unlikely that a significant portion of the victims are Samsung customers, it’s also worth repeating that virtually all modern Galaxy devices have a built-in scanner for barcodes and QR codes.

This has been the case for several years now. Even the original version of One UI based on Android 9 Pie offered matrix barcode recognition as well as some very convenient implementations of the same technology, such as QR-based Wi-Fi sharing. Basically all you have to do is point your phone’s camera at a barcode or QR code to scan it and click on the link that appears on the screen. You can also pull out the notification shade and tap an icon that says Scan the QR code, wherever he sits.

Are Android purists still justified in their obsession with a vanilla OS experience?

So, there really is no reason for you to even risk being the victim of a crime if a capable barcode and QR reader are all you are looking for. And given the details of what happened with the aforementioned rogue-turned scanner, it is nearly impossible to blame users’ lack of technical knowledge as the root cause of this particular debacle. Legitimate apps can be hijacked or sold to malicious owners, as can ad SDKs used for freemium monetization. Worse yet, none of this appears to have been the case for Barcode Scanner, reports Malwarebytes.

So we’re taking a look at the latest in a long list of examples highlighting Google’s ongoing struggles to tackle malicious Android apps. These growing difficulties have been around since the platform’s early days, when everyone craved vanilla Android implementations and Samsung’s software was far from the fastest option out there. Well, times have certainly changed, at least on this side of the ecosystem.