IBM Watson

How we hacked YC Spring 2025 batch’s AI agents — Rene Brandel, Casco

Jul 30, 2025 · 17:33

Rene Brandel, CEO of Casco, explains how his team hacked seven of sixteen YC Spring 2025 batch AI agents within 30 minutes each, revealing three critical security flaws: cross-user data access via IDOR, arbitrary code execution through code tools, and server-side request forgery (SSRF) from tool endpoints. They extracted personal data by exploiting missing authorization checks, overwrote security controls by writing malicious files into code sandboxes, and stole Git credentials by manipulating a database-schema tool. Brandel emphasizes that agent security extends beyond LLM prompt injection, advises treating agents as users with proper authentication and authorization, and warns against rolling custom code sandboxes, recommending out-of-the-box solutions like E2B. The talk concludes with a Q&A on extracting system prompts and the dangers of local coding agents.

EyeLevel Launch: Your RAG is Tripping, Here's the Real Reason Why

Feb 6, 2025 · 6:13

Benjamin Over, co-founder of EyeLevel.ai, argues that 95% of RAG hallucinations stem from content ingestion problems, not LLMs or prompts, and introduces his platform's approach to solve this. EyeLevel avoids vector databases entirely, instead creating semantic objects with auto-generated metadata and rewriting text for search and completion. Its pipeline uses a fine-tuned vision model to extract tables, figures, and text, then applies nine fine-tuned models for ingestion and search, including a re-ranking LLM. Air France uses EyeLevel to build a call-center co-pilot, achieving over 95% accuracy on hundreds of thousands of complex documents. In a study, EyeLevel reached 98% accuracy on real-world documents, outperforming popular solutions by up to 120%.