DEF CON CrowdStrike’s president received praise from DEF CON attendees after accepting the Pwnie Award for most epic fail following the recent global IT outage caused by the infamous Falcon sensor update.
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The recipient of the award was never really in question. The list of nominations for each Pwnie was released five days after the incident began and therefore there could only be one winner in 2024.
While all other awards ceremonies have a shortlist of nominations with a detailed explanation, the “Epic Fail” category only lists the candidates “lol” and “lmao even”.
CrowdStrike has rightly drawn a barrage of criticism for its role in what is arguably the IT event of the year. But CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas took the stage at the annual awards ceremony at DEF CON this weekend, confidently grabbed the ironically large trophy and faced the embarrassment.
“This is definitely not an award to be proud of,” Sentonas told conference attendees in his acceptance speech. “I think the team was surprised when I immediately said I would come and pick them up because we did this terribly wrong. We’ve said this several times before and it’s super important to own up to it when you do something well. It’s super important to own up to it when you do something terribly wrong, which is what we did in this case.”
“The reason I wanted the trophy is: I’m going back to HQ. I’m going to take the trophy with me. It’s going to have a place of honor because I want every CrowdStriker that comes to work to see it because our goal is to protect people and we got that wrong and I want to make sure everyone understands that this can’t happen and that’s what this community is about.
“So from that perspective, I want to say thank you. I will accept the trophy and we will put it in the right place and make sure everyone sees it. So, thank you very much.”
The speech and Sentonas’ candor were met with thunderous applause. During the President’s acceptance speech, scattered cheers rang out from the crowd, growing louder with each round of applause. It was an expression of appreciation from a room full of people whose weeks were most likely ruined by CrowdStrike last month.
While DEF CON supporters may have been appeased by those words, CrowdStrike customers like Delta continue to rage in the background over the ordeal that reportedly cost the airline half a billion dollars.
In fact, Delta recently accused the troubled security vendor of trying to shift blame for the IT outage – a conclusion that contradicts that of the DEF CON audience that attended the president’s speech.
A standoff between three parties ensues: Delta figuratively points a gun at Microsoft and CrowdStrike and threatens both with lawsuits. Both are accused of wrongdoing because the two companies were particularly badly affected by the outage.
Microsoft and CrowdStrike have fired back, with Satya Nadella and Microsoft’s legal representative claiming the company offered Delta daily IT support between July 19 and July 24, but it was ignored, before claiming Delta’s IT environment needed to be modernized.
CrowdStrike also went on the offensive following Delta’s allegations of gross negligence, denying the allegations and announcing that it would vigorously defend itself against any lawsuit brought against the company.
Similar to Microsoft, CrowdStrike’s lawyer also claimed in its letter to Delta that the airline’s IT may not be up to date, adding that if Delta were to pursue litigation, it would need to explain exactly why that might be the case.
Like Microsoft, CrowdStrike claimed that Delta had rejected its offers of support – which Delta said was too little, too late. ®
