CrowdStrike has accepted the 2024 Pwnie Award for Most Epic Fail, with president Michael Sentonas delivering an acceptance speech in person. Sometimes the best course of action is to simply suck it up, admit your mistakes, and take the L.
This year’s Pwnie Awards Ceremony was held on Saturday at the DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas. Now in its 17th year, the Pwnie Awards recognises some of the most outstanding achievements in technology security over the past year — as well as the greatest failures.
As such, it was obvious that CrowdStrike would take home an award this year. Over 8.5 million Windows computers went down in July after the cybersecurity company pushed out an update to its software, bringing numerous companies and services across the world to a sudden halt. Businesses impacted included banks, airlines, mail carriers, supermarkets, and telecommunications companies.
The CrowdStrike outage was a massive global event, which has now been recognised with a massive Pwnie Award trophy. The two-tiered trophy awarded to CrowdStrike dwarfed the smaller pony-shaped ones for other categories, as befitting the eclipsing size of its blunder.
“Definitely not the award to be proud of receiving,” Sentonas said in his acceptance speech, taking the stage to laughter and applause. “I think the team was surprised when I said straight away that I’d be coming to get it. We got this horribly wrong, we’ve said that a number of different times. It’s super important to own it when you do things well, it’s super important to own it when you do things horribly wrong, which we did in this case.”
Accepting the large golden trophy, Sentonas stated that he intended to display it at CrowdStrike’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. His hope is that it will serve as a reminder to CrowdStrike’s staff to prevent such mistakes from happening in the future.
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“The reason why I wanted the trophy is I’m heading back to headquarters,” Sentosas continued. “I’m gonna take the trophy with me, it’s gonna sit pride of place, because I want every CrowdStriker who comes to work to see it. Because our goal is to protect people, and we got this wrong, and I want to make sure that everybody understands these things can’t happen, and that’s what this community’s about. So from that perspective I will say thank you.”
Sentonas’ in-person acceptance of CrowdStrike’s Pwnie Award was widely well-received, with social media users praising him for accepting accountability with humility, class, and good humour.
CrowdStrike was the sole contender for 2024’s Most Epic Fail Pwnie Award
Though CrowdStrike’s Most Epic Fail trophy was only awarded this weekend, its win had already been announced alongside the Pwnie Award nominations in late July. This was within mere days of the infamous global outage that took down numerous companies and services worldwide.
In a post to X at the time, the Pwnie Awards stated that it was granting the early award due to “extenuating circumstances.” Said circumstance was likely the fact that CrowdStrike’s fail was so epic that no one was likely to match it unless they deliberately tried. Even then, it would still be a difficult task.
While all other categories at the 2024 Pwnie Awards had three finalists, CrowdStrike had no competition for the’ Epic Fail Award. Instead, nominee details for the category simply read, “Lol. Lmao even.”
“This award is for the defenders who dared to wonder, ‘What could possibly go wrong?'” reads the Pwnie Awards’ description of its Most Epic Fail Award. “This award will honor a person or corporate entity’s spectacularly epic fail – the kind of fail that lets the entire infosec industry down in its wake. It can be a singular incident, marketing piece, or investment – or a smoldering trail of whale-scale fail.”
Last year’s Most Epic Fail winner was the Transport Security Administration (TSA), after a hacker discovered their no-fly list on an unsecured server. Though at least the TSA can say its mistake didn’t take out IT systems across the globe.
