Researchers at Georgia Tech Information Security Centre (GTISC) have developed prototype software which can instantly thwart illegal commands during money transfers.

Dubbed ‘Gyrus’, the software takes implements a ‘What You See Is What You Send’ policy and takes additional steps to avoid malware from delivering spam emails and instant messages, researchers added.

GTISC director Wenke Lee said: "Gyrus is a transparent layer on top of the window of an application. If Gyrus detects that user-intended data has tampered with, it will block the traffic and also notify the user."

The software limits the system to only send user-intended network traffic by capturing richer semantics such as both user actions and text contents, together with applications semantics.

Georgia Tech PhD student Yeongjin Jang said: "The idea of defining correct behaviour of an application by capturing user intent is not entirely new, but previous attempts in this space use an overly simplistic model of the user’s behaviour."

"Gyrus indirectly but correctly determines user intent from the screen that is displayed to the user, " Jang said.