CrowdStrike won the 2024 Pwnie Award for Best Epic Failure, and President Michael Sentonas personally delivered his acceptance speech. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to suck it up, admit your mistake, and accept the L.
This year’s Pwnie Awards ceremony was held on Saturday at the DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas. The Pwnie Awards, now in their 17th year, recognize the most outstanding achievements as well as the most egregious failures in technology security over the past year.
CrowdStrike 3 days after hiatus: How is everything now?
So it’s a no-brainer that CrowdStrike wins this year. More than 8.5 million Windows computers failed in July after the cybersecurity company rolled out a software update, bringing companies and services around the world to a sudden halt. Affected businesses include banks, airlines, posties, supermarkets and telecommunications companies.
The CrowdStrike outage was a massive global event and has now been awarded a huge Pwnie Award trophy. The two-tiered trophy CrowdStrike received dwarfed the smaller pony-shaped trophies in other categories, befitting the magnitude of the mistake it made.
Tweet may have been deleted
“This is definitely not an award to be proud of,” Centonas said in his acceptance speech. As he walked onto the stage, the audience burst into laughter and applause. “I think the team was surprised when I straight up said I was going to come and get it. We made a serious mistake and we’ve said it many times. When you get something done, it’s very important to have it, It’s important to have it when you do something terribly wrong, like we did in this example.
After accepting the large gold trophy, Sentonas said he planned to display it at CrowdStrike headquarters in Austin, Texas. He hopes this will alert CrowdStrike employees to prevent this type of mistake from happening in the future.
Popular stories that can be mixed and matched
“The reason I want the trophy is because I want to go back to headquarters,” Sentosa continued. “I’m going to carry the trophy, and it’s going to be in the most visible place because I want every CrowdStriker who comes to work to see it. Because our goal is to protect people, and we got it wrong, and I want everyone to see it. Understanding that these things don’t happen, that’s what this community is about, so from that perspective, I say thank you.
Sentonas’ acceptance of CrowdStrike’s Pwnie Award in person was well received, with social media users praising him for accepting the responsibility with humility, grace and good humor.
CrowdStrike is the only contender for the 2024 Pwnie Award for Most Epic Fail
Although CrowdStrike’s “Most Epic Fail” trophy was only awarded this weekend, the winner was announced at the end of July along with the Pwnie Award nominations. Just days ago, the infamous global blackout crippled numerous companies and services around the world.
Pwnie Awards said in a post to X at the time that they were awarding the award early due to “extenuating circumstances.” The above is likely because CrowdStrike’s failure was so epic that no one could match it unless they deliberately tried. Even so, it’s still a daunting task.
Tweet may have been deleted
While all other categories of the 2024 Pwnie Awards have three finalists, CrowdStrike is not competing for the Epic Fail Award. Instead, the nominee details for the category simply read: “Lol. Even Lmao.”
“This award is given to defenders who dare to think, ‘What could have gone wrong?'” reads the Pwnie Award’s description of its “Most Epic Failure Award.” “The award will recognize an individual or corporate entity’s epic failure – a failure that brought the entire security industry to its knees. It could be a single incident, marketing piece or investment – or it could be a whale-sized smoldering Trace failed.
Last year’s “most epic fail” award went to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) after a hacker discovered their no-fly list on an unsecured server. However, at least the TSA can say that its mistake did not paralyze global IT systems.
