Phillip Wylie Show

Tim MalcomVetter has spent 26 years moving between offense and defense, and his biggest takeaway is that the future of security comes down to speed - whoever has the fastest software wins.
Tim got his start by offering to work for free at a hospital in the early days of HIPAA, which turned into his first security job. From there he moved into pen testing, including work on the point-of-sale system behind roughly one in three U.S. credit card transactions, and then into red teaming at Walmart, where engagements could run as long as eight months. Today he is the co-founder of Wirespeed and General Manager of Coalition Security.
Recorded in person at Cybr.Sec.Con in Houston, this conversation with Phillip gets into what separates real red teaming from pen testing, what cyber insurance data reveals about which security controls actually work, and why so many in the industry misjudge risk. Tim also shares how his red team experience shaped his approach to automation, and why he sees the next era of attack and defense being decided in milliseconds.
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Connect with Tim MalcomVetter:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malcomvetter
WireSpeed: https://wirespeed.co
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Connect with your host, Phillip Wylie:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phillipwylie
X: https://x.com/PhillipWylie
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phillipwylie

License plate readers, police drones and fake cell towers are spreading fast, and two hackers are proving that anyone can detect them with about ten dollars of hardware and some open source firmware.
Colonel Panic is a malware researcher and hardware builder whose hacking started with AOL dial-up and stacks of 2600 Magazine. After years in restaurants and grocery retail, he went back to school during COVID, earned his certs and turned his love of rapid prototyping into privacy tools like OUI Spy. Cooper got his start on a hand-me-down 286 in fifth grade, spent his early years teaching privacy and security to activists, and has been a public interest technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for almost thirteen years, where he works on Rayhunter.
Building on their DEF CON talk, "ESP32 as a Counter-Surveillance Platform," this episode covers:
- How OUI Spy uses an ESP32-S3 and a buzzer to alert you when specific Bluetooth or Wi-Fi devices or drones are nearby, and what changed when Flock updated its firmware
- Mesh Detect, which sends alerts over Meshtastic networks to build a sensor net for tracking drones
- Rayhunter, EFF's open source firmware that turns a cheap Orbic mobile hotspot into a cell-site simulator detector
- Why "I have nothing to hide" falls apart, including a Flock misread that put an innocent woman in jail for weeks
- The national security risk of ALPR data piling up with vendors who have a track record of vulnerabilities
- The current surveillance boom and EFF's work on litigation, activism, Privacy Badger and Certbot
- Why war driving is legal, and how to get involved by building tools or showing up at city council meetings
DEF CON 34 - ESP32 as counter-surveillance platform:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcK-TDmzshcEFF
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Connect with Colonel Panic:
Website: https://colonelpanic.tech
https://x.com/_colonel_panic
https://colonelpanic.tech/
Connect with Cooper:
https://bsky.app/profile/cooperq.com
EFF: https://www.eff.org
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Connect with your host, Phillip Wylie:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phillipwylie
X: https://x.com/PhillipWylie
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phillipwylie

Luke Canfield came up the way a lot of hardware hackers do, the geeky kid in high school everyone came to when the school's computers broke, tinkering with Windows XP and war driving with homemade Yagi antennas built out of Pringles cans. That fascination with the hardware side never left him, and today he runs Reconnaissance Drone Consulting, teaching people about a threat surface most of the security world still isn't looking at.

Phillip and Luke met at KernelCon, and this conversation is a wide tour through the corners of security that live outside the usual enterprise conversation. They get into the resurgence of war driving and how a headless Kali Pi has replaced a car full of gear, why AI is reshaping RF and CTF competitions and what that means for people who still want to learn things manually, and Luke's real focus, drones as a multi-domain problem spanning the cyber, operational, and physical.

From there it opens up into the stuff that makes you rethink physical security entirely, the six-week drone iteration cycle coming out of Ukraine and how much of it ends up freely available online, why the cartels have run in-house drone design teams for over a decade, prison contraband as the biggest domestic misuse case, and the simple reason nobody looks up - as Luke puts it, humans evolved to avoid being eaten by big cats, not big birds.

He also shares his current build, an open source unmanned ground vehicle named Tortuga, made from two donated power wheelchairs, that's headed into Texas cattle pastures to spot parasite outbreaks with thermal imaging.

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Connect with Luke Canfield:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-a-canfield/ =========================
Connect with your host, Phillip Wylie:LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phillipwylieX: https://x.com/PhillipWylieInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/phillipwylie

Zack Korman came into cybersecurity from about as far outside the field as you can get, a UK law degree and a master's in law and finance, and he now spends his days on the AI defense problems most of the industry is still catching up to. His outsider path is exactly what makes his take on the current AI moment worth hearing.
Based in Norway, Zack got into code to win an argument with a professor, worked his way up to running a media company's tech department, then spent four and a half years as CTO of an Oslo cybersecurity startup building AI phishing simulations and AI insider threat detection. That work pulled him deep into the defensive side of security and into a conviction that detection is one of the most underserved areas of the field.
Phillip and Zack get into why the "thousand crap alerts" model of detection is broken, the blind spots that let obvious insider threats slip past a SOC that was never even receiving the data, and Zack's work on AI agent security, including the malicious MCP server he built to prove how completely an agent can exfiltrate a company. From there the conversation turns to the thing Zack has become known for online, pushing back on inflated AI risk claims, the fallout from the Hugging Face incident, and why so many of the loudest warnings about AI in cybersecurity are coming from people who have never worked in security. They also cover frontier versus local models, why smaller models could reshape defensive work, model guardrails and offensive testing, and Zack's straightforward advice for anyone trying to fold AI into their day to day.
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Connect with Zack Korman:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharyakorman/
X: https://x.com/ZackKorman
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Connect with your host, Phillip Wylie:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phillipwylie
X: https://x.com/PhillipWylie
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phillipwylie
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Sponsored by Suzu Labs
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All the ways to connect with Suzu Labs
https://suzulabs.com
https://x.com/suzulabs
https://www.linkedin.com/company/suzu-labs/

Most advice about breaking into cybersecurity tells you to follow the path. rekdt makes the opposite case: the path is exactly what makes you look like everyone else. In this episode he shares a candid, sometimes contrarian view of the field, shaped by nearly two decades in it.

rekdt runs a cloud security tower for a large enterprise operating across multiple clouds, and he came up through the professional cloud world during his time at AWS. He is also a longtime fixture in the hacker community, volunteering with the DEF CON Social Engineering Community and helping out at Red Team Village. His start in tech goes back to a teenage fascination with dial-up, the piracy and IRC scene, and picking apart malicious code on early MySpace pages, before a winding route through bartending and help desk work led him into engineering and eventually security.

In this episode, rekdt and Phillip get into why the most interesting security conversations happen at cloud and developer conferences rather than security echo chambers, how cloud and containers upended traditional defenses, and why shadow IT and vibe coding are making things harder. rekdt explains why cybersecurity is really a people problem, what actually makes a candidate stand out when everyone has the same resume, and why he sometimes asks people why they want to get into security at all.

He closes with honest, practical advice on building a career with an actual plan instead of just chasing the title.
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Connect with rekdt:
https://x.com/rekdt
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Connect with your host, Phillip Wylie:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phillipwylie
X: https://x.com/PhillipWylie
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phillipwylie
=========================
Sponsored by Suzu Labs
=========================
All the ways to connect with Suzu Labs
https://suzulabs.com
https://x.com/suzulabs
https://www.linkedin.com/company/suzu-labs/