‘Recognise Bitcoins but regulate them', says Larry Clinton

Chennai: Several countries including India are adopting a wait and watch policy on the regulation of the online currency Bitcoin. But US cyber security expert and president of Internet Security Alliance, Larry Clinton says all countries should recognise Bitcoin as traditional currency so that its use could be regulated.

In an interview to Deccan Chronicle on Friday, Larry Clinton said that even though Bitcoin reigns on the dark web that cannot be accessed using traditional Internet browsing techniques, governments across the world should recognise the use of Bitcoins in the real world.

“Its not being appropriately used, you say that it's being used to transfer money from one country to another but the problem is not the technology but how they are being used. Bitcoins is just another way of using commerce. In India, you borrow money and use it, I say why not you do it online using Bitcoins,” he said.

Pointing out that people buy botnet (collection of programmes, which communicate with other similar programmes in order to perform tasks) and malware at a low cost on the dark web, the cyber security expert emphasised that it would be difficult to keep attackers away from the dark web. “They are trained to do these attacks so one should not neglect them. We need to strengthen our security framework to handle these attacks,” he added.

Clinton is also of the opinion that India faced less cyber attacks, especially from the Chinese. “The Chinese always penetrate into computer systems to steal one's intellectual property but as India has less research and development available on the internet they don't attack Indian servers so much,” he noted.