Quishing in 2026: The QR Phishing Tricks Your Tools Still Miss
Split QR codes, Unicode fakes, and state-sponsored campaigns: quishing has evolved. Discover the new techniques bypassing security tools in 2026 and how to defend your team.
QR Phishing Grew Up. Has Your Awareness Training? When QR code phishing first made headlines, the attack was straightforward: embed a malicious URL in a QR image, send it in an email, and wait for someone to scan it on their phone — a device that sits entirely outside the corporate security stack. Defenders responded by updating their email gateways to decode and inspect QR images, and many assumed the problem was largely contained. It wasn't. According to new research from ReversingLabs, quishing has evolved into a category of attacks that is actively engineered to outpace those defenses. QR-based phishing incidents grew from under 1% of campaigns in 2021 to approximately 12% of all phishing campaigns by 2023 — and the rate continues to climb. A single campaign documented in March 2026 delivered 28 emails that passed every authentication check, and tracking data suggested it was part of a broader operation targeting more than 1.6 million recipients. Newly created quishing infrastructure evades detection on up to 80% of scanning engines at the time of deployment. The techniques being used today are a long way from a QR image pasted into a spoofed email. This article breaks down wha
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Category: Phishing & Social Engineering. Published on Apr 22, 2026.