A podcast about cybersecurity, technology and innovation issues in the military.
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In this episode of Phoenix Cast, hosts John and Kyle break down a genuinely wild story: an experimental OpenAI model that escaped its sandbox. Running without the usual cybersecurity guardrails while attempting an exploit benchmark, the model decided the smartest move was to cheat — chaining known vulnerabilities, discovering a zero-day, escalating privileges across OpenAI’s own network, and…
In this episode of Phoenix Cast, hosts John, Rich, and Kyle sit down with General Tim Haugh, U.S. Air Force (Ret.), the 19th Director of NSA and 4th Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, for a wide-ranging conversation on the future of American cyber power. The general makes his case for keeping the dual hat, takes on the CSIS and FDD reports calling for an independent cyber service, and explains why…
In this episode of Phoenix Cast, host John mentally travels back to the Marine Corps Communication Electronics School in 29 Palms, the place where the cast was basically born, to talk with Col Arun Shankar, MCCES’s commanding officer, and LtCol Steve Morello, who leads Communication Training Battalion. The conversation digs into how the comm community is shifting from being “just plumbers” to…
In this episode of Phoenix Cast, John and Rich sit down with Keith Mularski and Damon Mathews from Qintel. Keith is the former FBI agent who went undercover in DarkMarket as "Master Splyntr," eventually becoming a top-five spammer in the world and a "made man" in the cybercriminal underground before the operation culminated in 80+ arrests. Damon is a retired Marine CI/HUMINT officer now running…
In this episode of Phoenix Cast, hosts John and Kyle break down a packed week in cyber: the Canvas ed-tech breach by Shiny Hunters that hit 9,000 schools and 275 million records right at testing season (both of their kids' schools are scrambling to go non-digital), Firefox's eye-opening collaboration with Anthropic's Mythos model that surfaced 271 vulnerabilities in a single release for a fraction…
In this episode of Phoenix Cast, hosts John and Rich — with Kyle sidelined by what Rich suspects was an AI-orchestrated exploit — welcome CW4 Justin Helphenstine, a U.S. Army cyber warrant officer with 22+ years of service and deep offensive cyber operations experience. The conversation digs into what Army cyber warrant officers actually do versus their Marine Corps counterparts, how the talent…
In this episode of Phoenix Cast, hosts John, Rich, and Kyle welcome Katie Moussouris — founder and CEO of Luta Security, creator of Microsoft’s first bug bounty program, and architect of Hack the Pentagon — to break down Anthropic’s Project Glasswing and what it means when an AI model can find hundreds of real-world vulnerabilities at scale. Katie walks through the staggering complexity of…
In this episode of Phoenix Cast, hosts John and Kyle dive into two cautionary tales from Kyle’s AI-powered workflow — one where he spent $70 proving that AI detection tools are fundamentally broken, and another where he nearly lost his entire CRM database to a vibe-coded update gone wrong. Kyle walks through his process of writing a Marine Corps Gazette article using AI as a drafting assistant,…
In this episode of Phoenix Cast, hosts John, Rich, and Kyle break down the recent “hack” of McKinsey’s internal AI platform Lilly — where a security startup’s automated agent gained full root access through unsecured API endpoints in under two hours — sparking a lively debate on what actually constitutes a hack and why zero trust architecture still matters more than ever. The crew covers exciting…
In this episode of Phoenix Cast, hosts John, Rich, and Kyle dive into a passionate debate about why the military needs to stop relying on a single "AI guy" in every unit and instead adopt an "every Marine an AI rifleman" mentality — training all service members in AI fundamentals the same way every Marine learns basic marksmanship. Kyle breaks down what AI "marksmanship" actually looks like…
