I usually take the media headlines with a reasonable pinch of salt, however sometimes the potential impacts to my clients and my business make some worthy of taking notice.

Almost all of my UK web design clients have their websites hosted on my own dedicated UK-based server.

That means I have, through my provider support, full control over that server.

After seeing headlines in recent days about Russian cyber-attack threats towards the UK, whether spin or truth, I double-checked the server firewall settings to be sure that any IP addresses originating in Russia are blocked.

And they were - and to my knowledge, have been for many years, alongside several other countries where cyber-attacks frequently originate.

All of this is on top of underlying brute force attack protection.

You can never 100% guarantee security - but you can put as much in place as feasibly possible to ensure the risk is addressed and reduced.

It's why we have hardware firewall security before our server is even accessed.

Then operating system-level firewalls at server level.

Firewall software running on every single website.

24/7/365 monitoring software linked to every single website.

3-way backups running for every single website.

I can't ethically do this any other way - and it's all part of the support and hosting we include with every website we create and support (aside from those outside of the UK where local hosting is more appropriate).