The first hour after an incident matters most — for residents, services, and your council's trust.
HackFirstAid walks small and mid-sized municipalities through it in plain language, with no jargon and no procurement headaches. Free triage, 12 playbooks, and a US, Canada + UK regulatory grid.
Built for towns under ~100,000 residents · Atlantic Canadian roots, North-American practice · OT/SCADA out of scope by design
Tell us what just happened. We'll point to the right playbook and the right regulators.
The free triage is always free. No signup. No tracking. No data leaves your device. Use it during an incident or run it as a tabletop with your team.
Answer 2–5 plain-language questions about what you're seeing.
Matching playbook, first-hour actions, regulator hand-offs for your jurisdiction.
Email to your CAO, print for council, or work straight from the screen.
Why the first hour matters for towns like yours.
Indicative figures from publicly available reports. Travis updates these annually against the latest editions.
US state and local government entities hit by ransomware in 2024.
Source: Emsisoft, The State of Ransomware in the U.S. 2024.
Average downtime a government office experiences after a ransomware attack.
Source: Comparitech, worldwide government ransomware tracker.
Tracked US local-government ransomware victims serve populations under 100,000.
Source: Comparitech / Barracuda Networks ransomware analyses.
Scenarios written for the way municipalities actually run.
Tax, permits, billing, council, clerks, treasurer — vocabulary that matches your charter, not a corporate org chart.
Ransomware affecting core services
Tax, permits, utility billing, and court scheduling encrypted on the same morning.
Treasurer / finance department BEC
Fraudulent wire instructions on a vendor payment or payroll change.
Public-records system compromise
Vital records, property assessments, or business licenses exposed or altered.
Vendor / SaaS supply-chain breach
Your platform vendor was breached and your data may be in scope.
Reporting paths for the platforms your town actually runs.
Tyler, OpenGov, Granicus, CivicPlus, Accela, Microsoft 365 Government, Google Workspace — vendor-specific escalation playbooks paired with the matching incident scenarios.
Put the first hour on paper before you need it.
A one-page checklist your CAO, IT lead, and clerk can keep at their desks. Plain language. No vendor pitch. Built specifically for municipalities.
First-Hour Cyber Response Checklist
A printable, plain-language checklist for the first 60 minutes after a suspected incident. Built for small and mid-sized municipalities.
Built by Travis Barlow — 25+ years of incident response across the public sector, 580+ engagements, founder of AtlSecCon.
Atlantic-Canada based, working with US and Canadian municipalities. No vendor pitch, no fear marketing — just calm guidance for the worst morning of your year.
About Travis →Annual billing under most municipal single-quote thresholds. W-9 / BN ready. Sole-source justification template. GSA path on request.
Procurement paperwork →Council governance lives at boards.hackfirstaid.com. K-12 district playbooks at education.hackfirstaid.com. Small medical practice guidance at medical.hackfirstaid.com. Personal protection at hackfirstaid.com. SMB guidance at business.hackfirstaid.com. Executive leadership at leadership.hackfirstaid.com. IT practitioner and MSP guidance at it.hackfirstaid.com. Law firm incident response at lawfirm.hackfirstaid.com. Pension administrators at pensions.hackfirstaid.com. Family offices at familyoffice.hackfirstaid.com. Households at household.hackfirstaid.com. One voice across all twelve.
Try the triage before you need it.
Most municipalities use HackFirstAid first as a tabletop exercise — then again, for real, six months later. Both are free.
One cyber-readiness stack. Twelve audiences.
You run a town or county. HackFirstAid also covers residents at home, the clinics, businesses, and law firms in your community, the schools, the pension plan behind your employees' retirement, the boards, executives, and IT teams behind every organization you work with — and the Household portal your paid plan includes for every staff member's family.
For you and your family at home.
For the business with no security team.
For the towns everyone depends on.
For the districts protecting kids and data.
For the practices holding patient data.
For the boards that own the oversight.
For the executives who sign for it.
For the IT people who get the call.
For the firms holding clients' secrets and money.
For the administrators behind every pension payment.
For the office that runs the family's wealth.
For everyone under your roof — free with every paid plan.