The rules

• Aware is the normal baseline for the five non-terrorism areas. The site runs automatically: hand-written background information can provide context, but it does not hold a live rating above Aware. Recent official evidence and the automatic rules below can raise an area when something materially changes.
• Official evidence moves areas by itself. When two or more different official statements in the last 30 days (from GOV.UK departments and the NCSC) name hostile or state-linked activity affecting an area, that area rises to Elevated. It falls back on its own as the statements age out. They are listed under the area, so you can read them.
• The terrorism area follows the official MI5 threat level automatically, up and down.
• A small number of strict official, current and UK-relevant triggers can raise an area to High for a limited period. These include a nationally significant cyber incident with material impact on UK essential or public services, a grid warning involving demand control or load shedding, or confirmed damage to undersea infrastructure with a direct UK connection. Routine notices, historical reports and incidents elsewhere do not qualify.
• Nothing from the press moves a level. Other automatic headlines are shown for information only.
• Level 5 is set automatically only for a very clear official signal that has held for over 6 hours: the official terrorism threat level at CRITICAL, or the government naming an attack on the UK while convening COBR. Until it has held, the area shows High. Real emergencies will reach you first through Emergency Alerts and the government, not through this page.
• Losing a data source never makes the rating more reassuring. If Wary cannot read a source, it keeps the last level or active trigger it successfully confirmed for as long as that information remains valid, and labels it as last confirmed rather than live. If Wary loses its saved memory altogether, it says so and rebuilds cautiously from the available official sources.
• Emergency Alerts, the police, your council and the BBC remain the places to go for anything urgent. This site is a slower, calmer supplement to them, never a substitute.

How much to trust a source

• Official. Government, MI5, the NCSC, regulators and the grid operator.
• Established press. Wire services and major broadcasters that name their sources and publish corrections.
• Specialist or analyst. Useful and often early, but shown with more caution.

Privacy, in plain English

• No cookies. This site sets none.
• No ads, no visitor profiling, no tracking. It loads no third-party scripts, fonts or images, and your browser is told to refuse them.
• Your household answers, ticks and display settings (text size, contrast and so on) are saved in your browser’s own storage, on this device only, so the page can remember them. They are never sent to us. “Change”, then “Delete my details”, removes them.
• If you add a postcode area, your browser asks two public services about it directly: postcodes.io, to find your area, and the Environment Agency, for flood warnings. They can see your internet address, as any website can. This site never sees it. Leave the postcode blank to avoid this.
• The page saves a copy of itself in your browser so it opens without internet.
• The site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which keeps standard server logs. We cannot see them.
• This page counts visits with a single number: no cookie, no ID, and nothing that could tell one visit from another. The page sends no identifier or visitor information with the count. Cloudflare, which runs the counter, sees the request reach its network the way it does for any site; the Worker itself stores only that single aggregate total.

Who runs this

Run by an individual, not a company. It is non-commercial, carries no advertising, and is not an official service. No government body endorses it.

The levels and the change log are calculated automatically from official data, around the clock, using the rules under “How the ratings work”. They respond within the hour and do not depend on anyone being awake. Any “signals” are optional short summaries written by the editor in their own words, each linking to the original. The automatic headlines come only from official, open-licensed feeds.

The editor maintains the rules and is responsible for what the site says.

The only address for this site is wary.org.uk. Wary never sends emails, texts or notifications, and never asks you to log in or pay. If a message claims to be from it, it is not.

Corrections and questions: waryorguk@proton.me