Tel Aviv. Israel is under cyber-attacks all the time but is getting ready to a massive one, that might cause huge damages to its critical assets.

Sources say that most of the serious cyber-attacks come from Iran.

The threat is real and imminent. A cyber-attack on Israeli infrastructure may include air traffic control installations. In recent years, Israel has been under a constant cyber-attack and the government has ordered the general security service to take every needed step to counter those attacks.

The National Cyber Defence Authority (NCDA) unit, which is responsible for protecting Israel’s national infrastructures against cyber-attacks, will assume protection of banks and mobile carriers.

Israeli officials consider the cyber-attacks as an act of war and some were quoted saying that “an enemy should be treated like an enemy.” This means that the proper Israel organizations, will try and locate the source of the attacks, and make an effort to neutralize it.

Neutralize is a clean word for a major counter-attack, either with cyber tools and when possible with more traditional weapons, short, long and very long range ones.

As it looks now, this is an all-out war, and the concerns are high as signs prove that vital national installations are targeted almost daily.

The Israeli ATC system works very closely with this of the Israeli air force (IAF). Therefore, any attempt to disrupt one of them will affect the other and may cause chaos with “very extreme scenarios”.

So, there must be a more comprehensive effort to mobilize all the assets that Israel has, to defend the Israeli vital systems including its ATC system from organized or sporadic cyber-attacks.

What is very clear is that many of the budget that were traditionally channeled to the deployment of advanced systems that are aimed at defending Israel from attacks either by missiles, rockets or enemy aircraft, are being rerouted now to the new cyber war.

-The writer is an international roving correspondent of the publication