CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas accepted the award for Most Epic Failure at the Pwnie Awards.
Just a few weeks ago, a software update from CrowdStrike caused a global outage of customers’ IT systems. Instead of avoiding attention, the company openly admitted its mistake. CrowdStrike’s president Michael Sentonas personally appeared at the Pwnie Awards to accept the award for the “biggest failure.”
The Pwnie Awards is an annual information security awards ceremony held during the Black Hat USA conference. The event recognizes the most significant cybersecurity successes and failures of the past year. The name “Pwnie” comes from the hacker slang “pwn,” which means “to completely compromise” or “to gain control of something.”
The awards ceremony took place at the Def Con conference, right after the Black Hat event, where CrowdStrike had one of the largest booths and gave away free t-shirts and action figures. A company spokesperson told TechCrunch that CrowdStrike expressed its “gratitude and respect for the Black Hat community” to attendees.
A video of Sentonas’ speech is circulating online. The audience at the ceremony, like the conference attendees, seemed ready to give CrowdStrike a second chance. The audience welcomed Sentonas with enthusiasm and appreciated his willingness to admit the company’s mistakes.
CrowdStrike accepts the @PwnieAwards for the “biggest fail” at @defcon. Great performance. pic.twitter.com/e7IgYosHAE
— Dominic White 👾 (@singe) 10 August 2024
Organizers explained that this final award was an unexpected change in the program. They decided that CrowdStrike simply had to win this award. As the comically large trophy was brought onto the stage to loud applause, Sentonas confessed:
“This is definitely not an award to be proud of.”
“The team was surprised when I immediately agreed to take over,” Sentonas continued.
“We made a terrible mistake and we have said that many times. It is extremely important to recognise your achievements, but it is also important to recognise when you have done something terribly wrong.”
Sentonas said he will return the trophy to CrowdStrike headquarters and display it prominently. It will serve as a reminder that “our goal is to protect people and we made a mistake. I want to make sure everyone understands that this cannot happen.”
Source: Techcrunch
