Travis Rothstein’s Middletown-based ConnecTheDot marketing agency was cyber-attacked last fall. Before the attack, the company had $10 million in annual billings, 120 relationship-based clients (and thousands more online), and 23 employees across the country.

Rothstein ran a company with a great deal of marketing expertise so you would think he’d be prepared for a cyber-attack. But less than a year later, it’s all gone.

Participants in our recent Cybersecurity Roundtable repeatedly said that nobody believes a cyber-attack will happen to them. The fact that it happened to a business with a lot more digital expertise than most small-business owners sends a powerful reality check.

This is Travis Rothstein’s story in his own words. DBT has decided not to identify some people in this story and cannot independently confirm what happened since the investigation is ongoing.

The two-hour interview kept returning to the question of whether he missed something or perhaps just lost his focus. Rothstein talks about his mounting frustration as consultant after consultant was unable to explain what happened. But a question at the end of the conversation about having to let his entire team go as the situation deteriorated caused him to get emotional about how he felt.