Massachusetts's product-security and baseline-security posture rests on one enacted regulation with its own enabling statute, layered over the federal-level regimes already researched as this jurisdiction's national row and not repeated here.
201 CMR 17.00, Standards for the Protection of Personal Information of Residents of the Commonwealth, promulgated by the Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation under the rulemaking authority M.G.L. ch. 93H, section 2(a) grants it, requires every person who owns or licenses personal information about a Massachusetts resident, reaching anyone who receives, stores, maintains, processes, or otherwise has access to it in connection with providing goods or services or in connection with employment, to develop, implement, and maintain a comprehensive written information security program (WISP), in one or more readily accessible parts, with administrative, technical, and physical safeguards appropriate to the business's size, resources, amount of stored data, and the sensitivity of the information (17.03(1)).
The WISP must designate one or more employees to maintain it, identify and assess foreseeable internal and external risks, train employees, impose discipline for violations, cut off a terminated employee's access, restrict physical access and require locked storage, monitor the program's operation, review its scope at least annually or after a material change in business practice, oversee third-party service providers by selecting only ones capable of maintaining appropriate security measures and requiring those measures by contract, and document the entity's response to any security-breach incident (17.03(2)).
Where personal information is stored or transmitted electronically, 17.04 layers on a computer-system security program: secure user authentication, access controls limiting records to those who need them, encryption of records transmitted across public networks or wirelessly and of personal information stored on a laptop or other portable device, reasonable monitoring for unauthorized use, up-to-date firewalls and operating-system security patches for an internet-connected system, up-to-date malware protection, and employee training on the computer security system.
Every covered person had to be in full compliance by March 1, 2010 (17.05); there is no forward compliance runway left to describe.
Ch. 93H, section 6 gives the Attorney General authority to bring an action under ch. 93A, section 4 to remedy a violation of 'this chapter,' which 201 CMR 17.00 implements by its own text (17.01(1)); separately, 940 CMR 3.16(3), a general Attorney General consumer-protection regulation promulgated under ch. 93A, section 2(c), deems a failure to comply with a statute or regulation meant to protect the public and intended to provide Massachusetts consumers protection, which reaches 201 CMR 17.00, a ch. 93A, section 2 unfair or deceptive practice; that in turn opens ch. 93A, section 9 to any person injured by the deemed violation, recoverable as actual damages or $25, whichever is greater, trebled (or at minimum doubled) for a willful or knowing violation, plus attorney's fees, with a class action available under section 9(2), while the Attorney General may separately recover a civil penalty of up to $5,000 per violation under ch. 93A, section 4.
No Massachusetts statute sets security requirements a connected device or software product must meet before or after it reaches the market. The closest is S.3190 (194th Gen. Ct.), a redraft the Joint Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure reported favorably on July 22, 2026 from the original petition S.3090 (filed as Senate docket SD.3606 on January 16, 2026 by Senators William N. Brownsberger and David M. Rogers), now pending before the Senate Committee on Ways and Means.
As filed, it would require a manufacturer of a connected consumer product manufactured on or after January 1, 2026 to disclose a minimum guaranteed support period for technical support, security updates, and bug fixes, to notify consumers at least six months before end-of-life of the cybersecurity and other risks of continued use, and would require an internet service provider that supplies or leases such a product to keep it receiving security updates or replace it at no cost once the product reaches end-of-life; a violation would be an unfair or deceptive practice under ch. 93A, section 2.
It has not been enacted, so this is a researched absence rather than a gap in this profile's coverage, and the quoted provisions are the bill as introduced (S.3090); the committee's redraft, S.3190, has not itself been read for a possibly different set of terms. No Massachusetts cyber-resilience regime binding a class of entity by sector, criticality, or size, comparable to NIS2 or DORA, was located that reaches a digital service this corpus can currently flag against.
Massachusetts has no general private-sector duty to report an exploited vulnerability or a security incident, as distinct from a personal-data breach, to an authority; no analogue to New York's Chapter 177 (binding only government bodies) or to the federal Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (not yet implemented) was found reaching a private business here.
Massachusetts's breach-notification duty, ch. 93H, section 3 (with the credit-monitoring offer at section 3A for a breach touching a Social Security number), is already this jurisdiction's privacy row rather than repeated here: it and 201 CMR 17.00 sit in the same chapter, with the breach-notice duty attaching to the exposure of personal data and the WISP duty attaching to the security program that would have prevented it.
