Malicious QR Codes: How big of a problem is it, really?

Cisco Talos reports that QR codes are increasingly abused in email to bypass anti-spam defenses—often embedded in images, PDFs, “QR code art,” or rendered with Unicode—with about 60% of QR-code emails being spam and MFA-phishing a common outcome; the analysis explains why these lures evade detection and enterprise visibility (especially when victims scan via mobile networks) and recommends defanging QR codes by obscuring data modules or removing finder patterns, pre-decoding QR contents, and using secure analysis tools and email protections to mitigate risk.