The recent leak of over 400k total credit cards by a hacker called oxOmar and later the hacker’s challenge to catch him hasn’t gone down well the throat of Israel. The Israeli government has seen this incident as an act of terrorism. According to Israel, this incident was an attempt to disrupt the country’s banking system and caused the Israeli government trouble and incurred costs from having to destroy many cards and remake them.

According to Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Dany Ayalon, this incident now leaves them open to use whatever force they wish to obtain the hackers.

“It is necessary to send a message to everyone who attacks or tries to attack Israel, including in cyberspace,” Ayalon said to the Israeli Media.

Hackers stand warned, he said, “that they are putting themselves in danger and that they will not benefit from any immunity against reprisal actions from Israel.”

Cyber attacks amount to “terrorism that must be treated as such. In cyberspace, we have active capacities and we can hit those who try to hit us.”

Ayalon also applauded the United States for declaring that “all attacks in their cyberspace will be considered as a declaration of war and they will react as if it had been a missile attack.”

The U.S. resolution to respond to cyberattacks through missiles, has been deemed unimplementable by many experts as it is very difficult to ascertain the origin of an attack in the cyberspace (considering most attacks are executed using bots residing on compromised computers). It would be interesting to see if the new move by Israel is merely an attempt to scare off the hackers or they have concrete plans up their sleeves.