CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas personally accepted an award for “Most Epic Fail” at the annual Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas over the weekend. The award was given for the company’s software update that caused a global IT outage last month. Accepting the award, he said it’s “super important to own up to it when you do things terribly wrong, which we did in this case.”

The Pwnie Awards are presented each year at a ceremony at Def Con and recognize “the successes (and failures) of security researchers and the security community.” This year’s categories included awards for bugs on mobile, desktop and in the crypto world, an award for the “weakest vendor response” and an award for an “epic achievement” for researchers who discovered critical vulnerabilities.

In his speech, Sentonas said the Pwnie was “definitely not an award to be proud of,” but added that he would take it to CrowdStrike headquarters, where it “will have a place of honor because I want every CrowdStriker who comes to work to see it.” The Most Epic Fail award went to the U.S. Transportation Security Administration last year after a hacker discovered the agency’s “no-fail” list on an unprotected, internet-connected server. (Something similar happened in 2021.)

CrowdStrike blamed a bug in its testing software for the faulty update and promised to update its testing and bug handling and provide phased updates to prevent similar incidents in the future.