Barcodes’ pervasiveness in retail, health care and other service industries notwithstanding, hackers really haven’t paid much attention to these tiny lines of data.

But like other technologies supporting the so-called Internet of Things, there are bound to be vulnerabilities and there are bound to be white hats and black hats poking about. Researchers demonstrated a number of attacks using poisoned barcodes scanned by numerous keyboard wedge barcode scanners to open a shell on a machine and virtually type control commands. The attacks are relatively simple to carry out, and it’s difficult to pinpoint whether the scanners or host systems need to be patched.