Online banking fraud is one of the reasons most people get the shivers when thinking of making payments in this manner. Meet Gyrus, a new software from Georgia Tech which seems capable of curbing such criminal activities to a certain extent. The prototype program has also been designed to stop malware from sending spam emails and instant messages on behalf of the victim with the infected PC.
How does it work?
First of all, it’s important to understand how online banking fraud may occur. Say, you have a PC with malware hiding in it. When you use this infected machine to send a friend $20 over PayPal, the malware interferes with the transaction, increases the amount you wish to send to maybe $2000 and then redirects it to another account (in this case, the mischief maker’s).
‘Secure payment portals’ as we know them today are said to be inefficient at understanding user intent. Meaning, when you transfer money through a protected online gateway, the software guarding it can detect that you intend to pay for something or move cash to an account. But it may not be capable of finding out how much moolah you intend to transfer.
So if a suspicious program were to change the amount you send or the account which is receiving the payment after your final click, contemporary safety nets may prove less than useful. Gyrus works a bit differently. It’s a ‘transparent layer on top of the window of an application’ such as a money transfer system and follows a ‘What You See Is What You Send’ (WYSIWYS) policy.
Gyrus is built around the idea that text-based apps let users see exactly what they’ve chosen to do and make changes if necessary. The new software studies user actions and text contents as well as applications semantics to ensure that only user-intended network traffic flows out of their device or PC. It is claimed to be capable of executing these actions even in the presence of malware.
You can get more details by following this link.