A global outage of Microsoft’s Windows operating system caused massive disruptions across airlines, financial firms, banks, media, infrastructure and other industries in July. Blame was widely placed on cybersecurity firm CloudStrike, as a software update from that company went wrong and apparently led to the outage.
This past weekend, the company was recognized for its “epic fail.” CloudStrike’s president was on hand to accept the Pwnie Award, which is given annually to celebrate and mock successes and failures in the security industry.
Michael Sentonas took home a Pwnie for the most epic fail at Def Con, the hacker community event in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Pwnies are a well-organized award and are given at the end of a nomination process, but organizers said this year’s award for CrowdStrike was a last-minute change, “because… how could CrowdStrike not win?” TechCrunch said in a report.
Although he said that this was definitely not an award to be proud of, Sentonas remained calm.
In his acceptance speech, Sentonas said he would return the award to CrowdStrike’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, and display it prominently as a reminder that “our goal is to protect people. And we got that wrong, and I want to make sure everyone understands that this can’t happen.”
“I think the team was surprised when I said straight out that I was going to do it… Because we got it horribly wrong, we’ve said that several times, and it’s super important to own up when you do something well, it’s super important to own up when you do something horribly wrong,” he said.
What is CrowdStrike and how did it bring down the global internet?
The irony is that CrowdStrike is a cyberattack response, threat intelligence, and endpoint security company.
The buggy July 19 update caused a worldwide outage that affected air travel, banking, broadcasting, and even power plants and transportation services. It caused so-called “blue screen errors” on all screens running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. It took Microsoft a few days to fix the problem.
An estimated 8.5 million computer systems running the Windows operating system crashed or went into freeze mode. The business cost of the outage is estimated at at least $10 billion.
(With contributions from agencies)
