Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Relevant Activities
Certification
Timeline
Generic

Ryan South

Naperville

Summary

Looking for an opportunity in the IT/Cyber Security area that will allow me to apply my problem solving skills as well as technical abilities to expand my technical skills while working as part of a team on meaningful projects.

Energetic and analytical with passion for cybersecurity and keen eye for identifying potential threats. Possesses solid understanding of network security protocols and vulnerability assessments, complemented by skills in risk management and incident response. Dedicated to protecting organizational assets and ensuring data integrity.

Overview

1
1
year of professional experience
1
1
Certification

Work History

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Illinois State University
08.2023 - Current
  • Teach hands-on labs for introductory Java class
  • Ensure all students understand their assignment and can complete it effectively
  • Nurture students skills and translate my expert knowledge to something they will understand as beginners
  • Coordinate with professors and heads of the IT department to ensure that course material fairly challenges the students

Education

Masters - Information Systems with Network and Security Management Specialization

Illinois State University
Normal, IL
05.2025

Skills

  • Digital forensics
  • Network security
  • Attention to detail
  • Python programming
  • Linux
  • Project management
  • Agile methodologies
  • Java programming

Relevant Activities


Small Business Consultation

● Developed a Customer relationship manager for Advocacy for the Special Ones

● Worked as a project manager for the team

● Communicated with the client constantly to ensure their requirements were being met

● Showed the client the work that was done each week in a weekly standup to ensure the functions being developed aligned with her needs.

● Used Honeybook to build automation for her slow business processes such as Email, sending documents, creating and sending invoices, scheduling appointments, and more


Independent Study

● The focus of the research was on attacks on Diffusion-based AI models and the methods by which they can be attacked.

● Tried out some of the attacks personally

● Paraphrasing attacks can be done with enough testing or knowledge gained form the internet.

● Poisoning was also something I tested and for the testing I had to learn several other things

○ I used Google Colab and Gemini to help me create a program to import an old Stable Diffusion model from HuggingFace

○ I then imported my pictures with poisoned prompts and prepped them to be trained with the model.

○ I created a training loop for training the model including my data and could alter the learning rate and epochs

○ Finally, I tested different learning rates and epochs for hours over several days and realized just how much processing power you really                                        need for something like this. The semester ended quickly so I didn’t get the chance to do more testing with a different GPU or even a different Google GPU but I would like to revisit that in the future.

○ This study taught me much about AI which was something that I had been lacking in from my coursework. I feel that this was invaluable because of how prevalent AI will be in the future of not just IT but the world as a whole.

Certification

  • Security+ certified as of June 2022

Timeline

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Illinois State University
08.2023 - Current
  • Security+ certified as of June 2022

Masters - Information Systems with Network and Security Management Specialization

Illinois State University
Ryan South