Crowdstrike president accepts “most epic fail” award at hacker convention

Crowdstrike’s president, took to the stage at Def Con 32 to accept “Most Epic Fail” from the Pwnies awards.

The Pwnies is a dedicated award show for “achievements and failures” within the cybersecurity world. Previous years’ entries included “Best Desktop Bug” and “Lamest Vendor Response”. 

As the world still reels from the Crowdstrike outage, its president, Mike Sentonas, apologetically took to the stage.

It wasn’t without the typical humor that backed the awards. Think of the Pwnies like The Golden Raspberry Awards that mock the movie world’s Oscars. 

Before Sentonas accepted the award, the host brought a much larger trophy. Typically, winners are given a golden My Little Pony toy. 

In his very brief acceptance speech, Sentonas said that it wasn’t something to be “proud of receiving”. Sentonas did “shock” his team when he traveled to the hacker convention to accept it.

“We got this horribly wrong… it’s super important to own it… It’s super important to own it when you do things well, and super important to own things when it goes horribly wrong…,” he said.

Dominic White (via X)

The Crowdstrike failure has sparked new scrutiny into tech security. It didn’t only take down workplaces, but airports and hospitals.

Crowdstrike’s fix for the bug was a manual fix that had to be done by hand. 

While most places have recovered, Crowdstrike still remains in the iron sights of businesses affected. 

Delta Airlines claims it lost $500 million and is currently dealing with its own class-action lawsuit filed by those affected during the outage.

Sentonas said that he’s bringing the trophy back as a reminder for the team. “The reason I wanted the trophy is because I’m heading back to headquarters, and I’m going to take the trophy with me… When every Crowdstriker who comes to work to see it because our goal is to protect people and we got this wrong,” he concluded.