As with any phenomenon of popular stuff where users have an interest, it only takes a short time before it gets hijacked by the nefarious. Now, you will have to be wary of QR-Codes, the next target for malware penetration against your smartphones.

The warning came from Kaspersky Lab, which has discovered the first sign of QR code tampering. The first instance of QR code malware came from an Android app called ‘Jimm’ in Russia. After consumers download the app, the malware code in the app sent SMS codes to a premium rate number that charged for each message it sent.

A QR code is a type of bar code consists of two-dimensional black pixels arranged on a white background. It is used everywhere in daily life in the media, in daily used products, in electronics gadgets, in software applications and others. The consumers from Russia instead of downloading the application Jimm by scanning a QR code they had actually sent a premium SMS.

“The app is a trojan,” says company Malware researcher Tim Armstrong. The app accesses the SMS functions of a user’s Android device and sends premium text messages similar to 900 numbers in the U.S. “But if it is shown that this made the authors any kind of money, you can count on this happening again,” Armstrong said.

The research company said additional instances of the QR malware have been detected in past in older Nokia and J2ME systems. “As consumers become more comfortable using QR codes as an intermediary for acquiring information or discover new apps, the opportunities for malicious and scam appware escalates,” said Armstrong.

Anonymous attackers are now developing new technique to inject spam and malware attacks not only to web pages but also to mobile platforms. The rise of Android based smartphones have led to increasing percent of mobile threats in form of malware. As in Asia, Europe, compared to the US, QR code is even more popular, so one can expect in the future similar attacks in these areas would occur again.