Abstract
Recently, hackers intend to reproduce malicious links utilizing several ways to mislead users. They try to control victims’ machines or get their data remotely by gaining access to private information they use via cyberspace. QR codes are two-dimensional barcodes with the capacity to encode various data types and can be viewed by digital devices, such as smartphones. However, there is no approved protocol in QR code generation; therefore, QR codes might be exposed to several questionable attacks. QR code attacks might be perpetrated using barcodes, and there are some security countermeasures. Some of these solutions are restricted to malicious link detection techniques with knowledge of cryptographic methods. Therefore, this study aims to detect malicious links embedded in 1D (linear) and 2D (QR) codes. A cybercrime attack was proposed based on barcode counterfeiting that can be used to perform online attacks. A dataset of 100000 malicious and benign URLs was created via several resources, and their lexical features were obtained. Analyses were conducted to illustrate how different features and users deal with online barcode content. Several artificial intelligence models were implemented. A decision tree classifier was identified as the most suitable model for identifying malicious URLs. Our outcomes suggested that a secure artificial intelligence barcode scanner (BarAI) is recommended to detect malicious barcode links with an accuracy of 90.243%.