Cybersecurity for the local business
You are not being targeted for being interesting. You are being targeted for being reachable.
That line opened our cybersecurity clinic for local businesses, and it set the tone for everything that followed. Cybersecurity no longer belongs to IT departments alone. It stretches across departments and touches every business that sends an invoice or takes a card payment. Generative AI has raised the stakes further, scam emails now arrive fluent and correctly branded, and a caller can clone a familiar voice from a few seconds of audio.
No small business can absorb that shift alone, and no small business should have to. On Wednesday, July 29, 2026, faculty of the Scripps College of Communication and the J. Warren McClure School of Emerging Communication Technologies welcomed members of the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce to the Athens Area Cybersecurity Forum.
"We're too small to be a target"- Ten actions that improve your security
According to the Verizon 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, small and mid-sized businesses made up 96% of ransomware victims over the past year. With the threat picture in place, the core of the clinic covered ten common weaknesses, each paired with concrete hardening steps- multi-factor authentication, password reuse, staff awareness, payment fraud controls, backups, patching, network segmentation, access control, third-party risk, and incident response.
To have a longer impact from the forum, we provide every attendee with a printed Ten-Point Cybersecurity Checklist, built to turn the session into a routine.
Security as community engagement
The forum grew out of Ohio University's ENGAGE pillar, which commits the university to listening to regional needs and responding with collaborative work. Our partnership with the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce, which offered the forum free to all of its members, extends that tradition to a need that every business in the region.
For the McClure School, the clinic also reflects how we teach. Our students learn that security succeeds when it serves real people with real constraints, and community sessions let them see that principle at work. We plan to offer the forum again and welcome requests from local chambers, associations, and business groups.
The McClure School of Emerging Communication Technologies strives to offer the best academic programs in the IT (Information Technology), cybersecurity, the game development and the Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) industries. Our programs and certificates cover numerous aspects of the rapidly changing industries of information networking, cybersecurity operations, data privacy, game development, digital animation and the academic side of esports.