Hilltop Bank Incident: Here's What I'm Learning
For the Made Safe™ Program and the Small Business Community it Serves
By Laura Baker, Executive Director of CyberWyoming
The recent cybersecurity incident at Hilltop Bank has sent shockwaves across Wyoming. As news spread that the bank had to disconnect its main and backup systems from the internet to isolate a breach—taking online banking, mobile apps, phone customer service, and branch operations offline—it brought normal business operations to a sudden halt for thousands of customers.
When a major financial institution with over $1.1 billion in assets has to cap debit transactions, pause scheduled automatic transfers, and halt direct payroll deposits while teams work around the clock to contain the issue, it hits home immediately. Seeing local small business owners left “dead in the water”—unable to pay vendors, process incoming invoices, or meet payroll—is a stark wake-up call for all of us.
Here is what this incident is teaching me as a small business leader, as an organization, and as a champion for the small businesses we serve across Wyoming.
1. If It Can Happen to a Bank, We Are All On Notice
Financial institutions operate under some of the strictest regulatory oversight in the nation, including Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) compliance mandates and multiple rigorous audits every single year. In Wyoming, banks lead the way in cybersecurity investments, infrastructure, and protocol.
If an organization with those resources, compliance standards, and multi-layered security measures can still suffer a crippling cyber incident, it puts every single one of us on notice.
I am worried and stressed—not in the same way Hilltop’s team is right now, but deeply concerned for the ecosystem around us: the small businesses we’ve helped in the past, our community healthcare agencies, our cities, our counties, and our main street shops. Coming on the heels of other recent state-level cyber incidents, such as the breach of the Wyoming Judicial Branch court database, this proves that our collective risk is significantly higher than many anticipated in the past.
If our leading financial institutions can go dark, none of us can afford to assume our critical supply chains and partners are immune.
2. What I’m Learning: Reviewing Our Own Incident Response Playbook
This crisis prompted me to pull out our own organization’s Incident Response (IR) playbook and audit our critical systems and third-party partners—specifically looking at our banking setup.
What I discovered was sobering: we had all our eggs in one basket.
If our primary bank were hit with a cyber attack like Hilltop’s, our nonprofit organization would find itself in the exact same boat as the businesses currently impacted—unable to access funds, run direct deposits, or fulfill operational obligations.
The Action We Are Taking
As a direct result of this lesson, we are making an immediate, practical adjustment to our operational strategy. As soon as possible, we are opening a savings account at a completely separate banking institution and moving enough funds from our nonprofit checking account to cover one full month of payroll.
That way, if our primary bank ever goes offline due to a cyber event, we will have liquid reserves sitting in a separate, isolated institution to pay our staff manually without interruption.
This single cash-reserve redundancy is the only change we need to make to our Incident Response plan, but it eliminates a massive single point of failure for our workforce.
A Message to Impacted Small Businesses
To all the small business owners who bank with Hilltop: I deeply empathize with what you are enduring right now. Trying to run a business when you cannot pay your bills, collect invoice payments, or compensate your hard-working employees is an agonizing experience.
Once this immediate crisis passes and the dust settles, I invite you to join our Made Safe™ program. Administered by CyberWyoming, Made Safe™ pairs small business owners one-on-one with trained Cybersecurity Business Counselors to help you build practical incident response playbooks, identify single points of failure, and navigate crises like this with confidence.
3. Standing with Hilltop's IT Team & Looking Ahead
My heart goes out to Hilltop Bank’s IT team, leadership, and front-line staff. They are working 24/7, barely sleeping, and carrying immense stress as they work through the painstaking, delicate process of verifying system integrity before bringing networks back online safely. Rebuilding and verifying complex financial systems under intense public scrutiny is an exhausting ordeal, and they deserve our empathy and patience.
Banks are a vital lifeline for local commerce, but they are not the only critical system small businesses depend on every day.
Once this crisis is fully resolved, CyberWyoming would be happy to partner with Hilltop Bank to help their commercial clients prepare for future cyber-induced disruptions. Whether by hosting joint educational workshops or providing one-on-one cybersecurity business counseling through our Made Safe™ program, we are ready to help Wyoming businesses strengthen their operational resilience against whatever comes next.
CyberWyoming administers the Made Safe™ program, a personalized 1-on-1 cybersecurity counseling framework designed specifically for micro-businesses, main street shops, and local service providers across Wyoming.
