Zhi Xiang Lin

This professor has taught: HACS101, HACS200

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Zhi Xiang Lin HACS200 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/02/2024	He was extremely helpful as the advisor for HACS200 and provided a lot of guidance on resources to review, ideas to consider and things to look out for. We ran into an issue with implementing randomization for our honeypot and we had this overly complicated system that we had designed, we ran it by Toby and his suggestion made it 100x easier to implement and saved us probably a whole week's worth of time. The class was extremely unconventional given it's a full semester project class and to be honest was a bit stressful with Cukier's data requests, but we always managed to deliver with Toby's help! HACS101 was also a blessing that I only realized in 200 because we'd ask Toby for how do we do something and he'd basically just pull up 101 slides and go over those with us again which helped us connect it back to what we had done last semester. Our group ended up referring back to the 101 slides for literally 90% of the commands and scripts we wrote. I also had a really enjoyable time chatting with him on career advice, it's really refreshing to hear from someone who's been in the ACES program and how the ACES curriculum helps with full time jobs in the future.
Zhi Xiang Lin HACS101 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 08/14/2023	Rude and dismissive to students. Very condescending. Expects students to figure out most of the class by themselves. Grades unpredictably.
Zhi Xiang Lin HACS101 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/03/2023	Toby is a really great professor and you can definitely tell that he wants you to succeed not only in his class, but also in the industry in general. His slides are so good! All the other professors are just a wall of text, but the slides in 101 are all diagrams and visuals which really helps with understanding the concepts. Quizzes are easy as long as you took notes in class or you can watch the recording too to get the answers. The homework assignments are straight forward and he provides a learning outcome statement for each assignment and how that relates to the future HACS200 class, some of them are harder than others, I think on the average they were a few hours each week. The midterm was really tough, but Toby gave a debrief afterwards and showed which slides he took the questions from and let us do exam corrections to get points back. I think that really shows that he really does want you to learn the material, but at the same time offering some grade protections for us. He also spends a lot of time focusing on the outside of classroom skills, like teaching us how to ask good questions for feedback, I really liked that because it helped me feel less anxious about asking others for feedback, having almost like a template of do's and don'ts. He answers questions really quickly on slack, sometimes even late at night. He's also super great to talk to about cybersecurity or compsci in general, he'll share a lot of his industry experiences with you. I asked him for suggestions on some material that was outside of the course material and he was able to provide a lot of advice to me. An important note is that Toby does not do any research as he's not a full time faculty, he said that because he has a full time industry job outside of ACES, he doesn't do research but was able to point me to professors that did do research. It was also really cool to learn about the company that he and another ACES student founded while they were at UMD. Overall, I really liked the class, helped me understand networking and containers a lot more, would definitely recommend having him for the class!
Zhi Xiang Lin HACS200 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/03/2023	Toby clearly cares about his students, but he doesn't actually do anything to try to make their lives easier. He didn't show up to half of our classes (which apparently was in his contract but not at all helpful for us). We have to use his software for our project, but it was extremely buggy which led to some students rewriting it. We tried to not use his software at all but quickly realized without it we wouldn't have enough data to do our research and my group didn't have the time or technical experience to rewrite it. It's poorly documented which means we barely knew how to set it up or use it, even though it had a lot of features that could've been helpful (if it was written properly). He tries to help, but has a hard time doing it meaningfully.
Zhi Xiang Lin HACS200 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/25/2022	Despite having been involved in the design of this class and the academic direction of the ACES program for many years, Toby is still not able to facilitate anything close to a smooth or purposeful learning experience. Students are sorted into teams of four in order to complete a honeypot research project throughout the semester; at no point is anyone taught any research methods or ways to approach experiment design. We were expected to just totally understand how to ask meaningful (good) questions to produce interesting results without any actual background in previous bodies of work. Additionally, nobody taking this class feasibly has the technical background or time needed to set up data collection mechanisms to actually track the behavior of attackers over time, but the instructors expect students to draw results and write papers from a mountain of useless spam reconnaissance attempts. I personally found Toby to be condescending and snide whenever my team asked for help. Every team is essentially forced to use buggy, undocumented software maintained by Toby himself in order to meter and track access to their honeypots by attackers. This software was updated without notice throughout the semester, and some options that are necessary for proper operation are not documented anywhere. I even went back and checked the HACS101 slides - the only way we were able to get our setup to work was by asking Toby himself, for which we were chastised for not doing it right in the first place. By the end of the class, I felt that I had learned nothing about cybersecurity research. The sum total learning from my "Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students" honors classes is a collection of disjointed Linux command line knowledge, much of which I already knew when entering ACES. This class is a total waste of time and needlessly stressful for its two credits.
Zhi Xiang Lin HACS101 Expecting an A Anonymous 09/17/2022	Toby is definitely super knowledgeable about cybersecurity. If there is anyone you would want to get information about cyber from, it's him. He has a lot of industry experience and even runs his own cybersecurity company, so he is really trustworthy and knows the latest trends from the industry. The homework assignments can be challenging (as well as the final) but you will learn a lot about Linux, networking, etc. from this class.
Zhi Xiang Lin HACS101 Expecting an A Anonymous 06/03/2022	Good professor, very receptive and helpful. He definitely wants you to succeed in the class. Weekly quizzes were easy as long as you paid attention during class, but weekly homework often took a long time. The final was rough and not completely based on what we did during the class (more focused on what we will do during HACS200), but he curved the final so it didn't negatively damage people's grades too much.