How we hacked YC Spring 2025 batch’s AI agents — Rene Brandel, Casco
Source: YouTube · AI Engineer · published Jul 30, 2025 · 17:34
AI agent security encompasses entire system architectures beyond LLM vulnerabilities, as proven by hacking 7 of 16 agents in 30-minute Y Combinator tests 3:00.
Key Takeaways:
• Cross-user data access: IDOR vulnerabilities allow unauthorized data traversal using guessable IDs 4:22. Fix requires authentication + authorization 5:41.
• Code execution risks: Custom sandboxes with file write/execute permissions enable security overrides 9:45, causing lateral movement and breaches 11:23. Use professional solutions 11:54.
• SSRF vulnerabilities: Agents accessing private resources expose credentials when coerced into malicious requests 12:47, risking codebase leaks 13:39.
Treat agents as users with input sanitization and avoid custom security implementations 15:01.
Sources:
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First 800 characters of the transcript
[Music] So, yeah. Who's ready to hack some agents? Yeah. Oh, wow. All right. So, let me first introduce myself a little bit. I'm Renee. I'm the CEO of Casco. We're a YC company, and we specialize in red teaming AI agents and apps. And so we spent uh I spent my previous time at AWS working on AI agents, but I've always really loved working on AI. In fact, there's a video of me 10 years ago building voice to code and I won Europe's largest hackathon by doing that. And so I would talk to it, say, build me a blog post and it would generate the sites. And it was actually it was kind of fun. Like it did uh things like um yeah, load in pictures from San Francisco. And you can see how horribly slow the APIs were back then. And I'm going to about to give you a nightmare by showing you the architect…