Sen. Bob Ide didn’t want to say “I told you so” when a major Wyoming bank went offline this week to confine a cybersecurity problem, since he empathizes with the panic his fellow business owners who bank at Hilltop are probably experiencing.
But the bank shutdown only justifies Ide’s long-running efforts to introduce more gold and precious metals into Wyoming’s economy, the Casper-based Republican told Cowboy State Daily in a Thursday phone interview.
“That’s why I ran the bill. For situations like this,” said Ide, who works in commercial real estate.
Before he was a state senator, Ide said, he advocated for the passage of the 2018 Wyoming Legal Tender Act, which designates gold and silver as legal tender in Wyoming and exempts them from taxes.
That bill became law in March 2018 without the signature of then-Gov. Matt Mead.
As a state senator in 2025, Ide championed into law the Wyoming Gold Act, which requiresWyoming to hold $10 million of its permanent mineral trust fund in gold, and requires the state treasurer to invest in precious metals where “market conditions warrant.”
Again, the bill became law without the governor’s signature – a sign of passive disapproval or indifference.
The Wall Street Journal in March highlighted its unique upshot: Wyoming keeps $10 million in gold, with tight security measures, under an old newspaper building in Casper.
“The Wyoming Gold Act, (because of) what happened yesterday, really isn’t theoretical anymore,” said Ide. “You’ve got one bank, one attack, and thousands of people are rationed.”
Hilltop Bank, a $1.1 billion enterprise that Wyoming’s True family runs and has nine branches in the state, started seeing issues with its system Tuesday.
Overnight as Tuesday turned to Wednesday, the bank realized it had suffered a “cybersecurity incident,” Hilltop spokesman Bill Salvin told Cowboy State Daily in a Wednesday phone interview.
The bank unplugged everything – including its backup system – to isolate the incident, said Salvin. Customers can’t bank, except to withdraw or use up to $1,000 a day via their debit cards, he added.
The bank has since created a website to address the incident, since its own website and phone lines, as well as online banking, went down around Tuesday morning. It also established a call center at 307-265-2740.
Hilltop announced Thursday morning that its main office, Casper downtown office, MotorBank, Glenrock office and Cheyenne downtown office all are open for limited transactions.
“It kind of rattled the cages here locally for sure,” said Ide.
Most Hilltop locations are in the Casper area, though some are in Cheyenne and Glenrock as well.
“I hope it’s not a glimpse of things coming. But it’s looking pretty shaky out there,” Ide said. “The gold buffs always like to say, if you don’t hold it, you don’t own it.”
Ide acknowledged that the 2025 bill doesn’t push people to keep gold of their own. But he said it could serve as an awareness campaign for the private citizen anyway.
“With federal reserve notes there’s a lot of counterparty risk, and they can de-base like they are with the $2-trillion-a-year back in (Washington) D.C., with the money racketeers back there, so to speak,” said Ide.
Ide said precious metals are one of the main protections a person can have for sound money.
“There’s no counter-party risk,” he said.
Not Touching That One But …
Laura Baker, executive director of the non-profit group CyberWyoming, a team of cybersecurity counselors, told Cowboy State Daily the whole gold topic isn’t in her wheelhouse.
But she authored a blog post Wednesday urging small businesses to take other practical steps in case of future incidents. She called the shutdown a “stark wake-up call for all of us.”
CyberWyoming is going to open a savings account at a separate banking institution and move enough funds from its checking account to cover one full month of payroll, the blog says.
Baker added in a Thursday interview that people spreading their eggs into different baskets in this way should also make sure the different banks they use don’t use the same software system.
Baker said the problem at Hilltop only affirms how inevitable cybersecurity problems are. She says she knows Hilltop to be well-reputed.
Bank customer Ray Hunkins echoed that in a Thursday interview, saying he banks at four institutions and has been impressed with Hilltop’s layers of security.
Cybersecurity problems are rarer in banks than other industries, said Baker, “because they’re so heavily regulated and they’re audited constantly.”
She said banks lead the way in tech security.
Baker floated the possibility that this incident came from a highly sophisticated source, like an AI created to find, and capable of exploiting, weaknesses in software programs.
“It could have been anything,” said Baker. “Give a little grace and don’t start pointing fingers at humans that are our friends and neighbors.”
Pretty Grateful Over Here
Hunkins, a longtime Wyoming lawyer, author, and civic leader, told Cowboy State Daily that from his vantage, Hilltop is working hard to remedy problems.
Cowboy State Daily interviewed three Hilltop customers Wednesday, all of whom were frustrated and at least two of whom contemplated switching banks.
Hunkins countered, saying his experiences with Hilltop have been good, and on Wednesday bank personnel helped him coordinate a large transfer.
Cowboy State Daily’s sources also lamented the bank’s relative lack of communication and specificity prior to a public-relations blitz it undertook Wednesday afternoon.
They criticized what they called a lack of transparency.
“I certainly agree transparency is necessary,” said Hunkins, “but you can’t tell someone what the story is until you know the story.”
“And I think that we’ll know a lot more, and customers and the public should have that information when it’s known, but he worst thing in the world they could do is hypothecate and speculate about what might have happened,” he added.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
