The president of Crowdstrike took the stage at Def Con 32 to accept the award for “Most Epic Fail” at the Pwnies Awards.
The Pwnies is a special awards ceremony for “successes and failures” in the world of cybersecurity. In past years, the categories awarded have included “Best Desktop Bug” and “Lamest Vendor Response.”
While the world is still suffering from the consequences of the Crowdstrike outage, its president Mike Sentonas took the stage to apologize.
There was no lack of the typical humor that accompanies the awards. You could think of the Pwnies as the Golden Raspberry Awards, mocking the Oscars of the film world.
Before Sentonas accepted the award, the host brought a much larger trophy. Usually, winners receive a golden My Little Pony toy.
In his very brief acceptance speech, Sentonas said it was nothing to be “proud of.” Sentonas “shocked” his team when he traveled to the hacker conference to accept the award.
“We got this terribly wrong… it’s super important to own up to it… It’s super important to own up to it when you do things well and super important to own up to it when something goes terribly wrong…” he said.
Dominic White (via X)The Crowdstrike outage has led to a new critical look at technical security. Not only workplaces, but also airports and hospitals were paralyzed.
Crowdstrike’s fix for the bug was a manual fix that had to be performed manually.
Although most places have recovered, Crowdstrike remains in the sights of the affected companies.
Delta Airlines claims to have lost $500 million and is currently facing a class action lawsuit from those affected by the outage.
Sentonas said he was bringing the trophy back as a memory for the team. “I wanted the trophy because I’m going back to headquarters and I’m going to take the trophy with me… Every crowdstriker that comes to work should see it because our goal is to protect people and we did that wrong,” he concluded.
