Welcome to Connecticut

Right Here in Connecticut

Connecticut logged 342 reported ransomware incidents last year, a 47 percent jump from the year before. The average small business hit by one is looking at $150,000 to $500,000 in investigation and recovery costs, and roughly three and a half weeks of downtime — even if nobody pays the ransom. And here's the part that should sting a little if you run a small shop in this state: an estimated 93 percent of Connecticut's small businesses don't have dedicated IT security staff. That's not a knock on any one business owner. That's just what small means. You're running the business, not staffing a security operations center.

Connecticut has actually tried to meet this halfway. Under Public Act 21-119, a business that adopts a recognized framework — NIST, CIS Controls, ISO 27001 — gets a measure of safe-harbor protection if it's later sued after a breach. The state's Data Breach Notification Law also gives you a fairly tight 60-day window to notify affected residents and the Attorney General once you discover an incident. Good frameworks, real deadlines, and still a gap between what the law expects and what a two-person shop in Ridgefield or New Haven can realistically staff for.

SCORE has been running free small-business cybersecurity workshops around the state this year for exactly that reason — because most owners aren't looking for another vendor pitch, they're looking for someone to explain, in plain English, where they're exposed.

That's the same gap Hobbomock exists to close. We founded this company

as practical way to teach a business owner in Hamden or Milford how to talk to their employees, their customers, and their technology, without needing to become a full-time IT department to do it.

So if you're a small business owner in Connecticut, here's the honest question: if you had a breach tomorrow, do you know who you'd call in the first hour? If the answer is "I'd Google it," that's worth fixing before you need the answer, not after.

Let me know your thoughts — leave a comment, or send me an email. We're all in this together, even in a state as small as ours.