18 Buffalo Business Autumn 2026
"There's a tendency to talk about AI in big, abstract
terms," he says. "But this is real. It's a classroom where
students make decisions under pressure, backed by tools
that mirror what they'll see on the job."
Fill in the blanks
The course, Information Security and Assurance,
anchors both the MS in Management Information
Systems and the Advanced Certificate in Cybersecurity.
What makes it unusual starts before the simulation even
begins.
Instead of handing students a prewritten case, Cleary
gives them AI prompts and has them build a company
from scratch. Students plug in their own criteria — indus-
try, size, regulatory environment, technical infrastruc-
ture — and the AI generates a fully realized enterprise,
complete with systems architecture, data flows and oper-
ational details that would normally take an instructor
The alert comes in overnight. By morning,
the security team is sorting through what
happened, how far it spread and who needs to
know. The window for containment is shrink-
ing. Someone has to make the call.
In Kevin Cleary's classroom, the students
making that call are doing it for the first time.
Cleary, a clinical associate professor of
management science and systems, spent years
as a chief information security officer before
moving into the classroom. He sat at the table
during real breaches, real negotiations and
real fallout. And when he looked at how cybersecurity
was being taught, with static cases, outdated scenarios
and frameworks discussed in the abstract, he saw a gap
that bothered him.
UNDER
ATTACK
By Jacqueline Molik Ghosen
Cleary
AI turns cybersecurity class
into a real-world battleground
