The Twin-Tower terrorist attacks and anthrax envelope scares of 2001 were a watershed for public perceptions of the threat of unconventional terror in general and of biological terror in particular. Biotechnology, genetic engineering and molecular biology began to develop at an unprecedented pace towards the end of the last century. Advances in DNA synthesis and cloning will soon make it possible to produce any desired gene rapidly on an industrial scale at minimal cost. Forecasts indicate that this pace will continue to increase exponentially. Many areas of modern biological research are unavoidably dual use by nature. Thus hostile forces could also take advantage of recent and future biotechnological advances to harm humans on a catastrophic scale. Much information is freely available, and the list of organisms whose genomes have been sequenced is hardly selective in terms of biological risk. Regulation of life science and biomedical research in Israel is largely limited to biosafety concerns. Israeli researchers are no strangers to a certain amount of well-justified regulation. The big challenge now is to incorporate biosecurity concerns into this system, in particular, to upgrade measures to prevent the leakage of dangerous organisms, information and technologies to terror organizations. To this end the Israel National Security Council and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities initiated a national project, Biotechnological Research in an Age of Terrorism, and formed a special Steering Committee to analyze and report on the current situation and to recommend future action. In this article I will elaborate mainly on the risks of biotechnological dual-use research, the overview mechanisms and legislation aimed to encounter those risks.