Cyber Security Student Work/Study — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Student work/study with campus cyber security at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—automating network defense with ExaBGP and prototyping Google Rapid Response (GRR) integration for incident response workflows.
Key Achievements
- Configured ExaBGP for automated malicious-traffic blocking.
- Prototyped Google Rapid Response integration for university incident response workflows.
- Moved network-defense automation through campus security and infrastructure review, so BGP-level blocking could run inside the university's existing change-control process.
Context
University networks see a constant stream of malicious traffic. Manual blocklists do not scale: responders need automated containment that still fits campus change-control and incident process. The work mixed networking (BGP-level controls) with security operations tooling.
What I Built
Configured ExaBGP for automated malicious-traffic blocking and prototyped Google Rapid Response integration so incident handlers had a clearer path from detection to host-level investigation. Day to day that meant collaborating with campus security and infrastructure teams on network-defense automation.
Why It Mattered
A campus network is an unusually honest place to learn security automation, because the adversarial traffic never stops and the change-control process never relaxes. Automated containment had to be right and reversible at the same time — a BGP-level block that fires on a false positive takes real users offline. That constraint, more than any tool in the stack, is what the work actually taught.