What is a typical outcome of misconfigured export policies and what mitigations help?

• A. Exports leak routes to intended neighbors.
• B. Export policies are irrelevant.
• C. Export policies erroneously share routes with unintended neighbors; mitigations include strict filtering, staging tests, and monitoring.
• D. Export policies cause BGP to crash.

Answer: (C)

Export policies determine which routes a BGP speaker will advertise to each neighbor. When these policies are misconfigured, routes can be exported to neighbors that shouldn’t see them, leading to leakage of prefixes and potentially exposing customer networks or altering traffic flows. That’s why the described outcome—sharing routes with unintended neighbors—is the typical risk. Mitigations include strict filtering to limit what gets exported to each peer, staging tests in a controlled environment before deployment, and ongoing monitoring and auditing of route advertisements to catch and correct leaks quickly. In practice, you’d implement precise prefix-lists or route-maps to constrain exports, test policies in a lab, and use monitoring tools or route collectors to detect anomalies. Other possibilities like leaks to intended neighbors, irrelevance of export policies, or BGP crashes are not the typical, expected outcomes of misconfigurations.