CrowdStrike has accepted the 2024 Pwnie Award for Most Epic Fail, with president Michael Sentonas delivering an acceptance speech in particular person. Typically the very best plan of action is to easily suck it up, admit your errors, and take the L.
This 12 months’s Pwnie Awards Ceremony was held on Saturday on the DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas. Now in its seventeenth 12 months, the Pwnie Awards recognises a number of the most excellent achievements in expertise safety over the previous 12 months — in addition to the best failures.
As such, it was apparent that CrowdStrike would take dwelling an award this 12 months. Over 8.5 million Home windows computer systems went down in July after the cybersecurity firm pushed out an replace to its software program, bringing quite a few corporations and companies internationally to a sudden halt. Companies impacted included banks, airways, mail carriers, supermarkets, and telecommunications corporations.
The CrowdStrike outage was an enormous international occasion, which has now been recognised with an enormous Pwnie Award trophy. The 2-tiered trophy awarded to CrowdStrike dwarfed the smaller pony-shaped ones for different classes, as befitting the eclipsing dimension of its blunder.
“Undoubtedly not the award to be pleased with receiving,” Sentonas stated in his acceptance speech, taking the stage to laughter and applause. “I believe the staff was shocked once I stated right away that I might be coming to get it. We acquired this horribly improper, we have stated that numerous completely different instances. It is tremendous essential to personal it while you do issues effectively, it is tremendous essential to personal it while you do issues horribly improper, which we did on this case.”
Accepting the big golden trophy, Sentonas said that he meant to show it at CrowdStrike’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. His hope is that it’ll function a reminder to CrowdStrike’s workers to stop such errors from taking place sooner or later.
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“The rationale why I needed the trophy is I am heading again to headquarters,” Sentosas continued. “I am gonna take the trophy with me, it is gonna sit delight of place, as a result of I would like each CrowdStriker who involves work to see it. As a result of our aim is to guard folks, and we acquired this improper, and I wish to ensure that everyone understands this stuff cannot occur, and that is what this group’s about. So from that perspective I’ll say thanks.”
Sentonas’ in-person acceptance of CrowdStrike’s Pwnie Award was broadly well-received, with social media customers praising him for accepting accountability with humility, class, and good humour.
CrowdStrike was the only contender for 2024’s Most Epic Fail Pwnie Award
Although CrowdStrike’s Most Epic Fail trophy was solely awarded this weekend, its win had already been introduced alongside the Pwnie Award nominations in late July. This was inside mere days of the notorious international outage that took down quite a few corporations and companies worldwide.
In a submit to X on the time, the Pwnie Awards said that it was granting the early award on account of “extenuating circumstances.” Stated circumstance was possible the truth that CrowdStrike’s fail was so epic that nobody was prone to match it until they intentionally tried. Even then, it could nonetheless be a troublesome process.
Whereas all different classes on the 2024 Pwnie Awards had three finalists, CrowdStrike had no competitors for the Epic Fail Award. As a substitute, nominee particulars for the class merely learn, “Lol. Lmao even.”
“This award is for the defenders who dared to marvel, ‘What might probably go improper?'” reads the Pwnie Awards’ description of its Most Epic Fail Award. “This award will honor an individual or company entity’s spectacularly epic fail – the form of fail that lets the complete infosec trade down in its wake. It may be a singular incident, advertising piece, or funding – or a smoldering path of whale-scale fail.”
Final 12 months’s Most Epic Fail winner was the Transport Safety Administration (TSA), after a hacker found their no-fly checklist on an unsecured server. Although no less than the TSA can say its mistake did not take out IT methods throughout the globe.
