CrowdStrike President Personally Accepts His Company's 'Pwnie'

In a move being hailed as classy, the president of CrowdStrike showed up this weekend to the Las Vegas Def Con hacking conference to personally accept the "Most Epic Fail" award at the conference's annual Pwnie Awards. The ceremony is meant to mark "the achievements (and failures) of security researchers and the security community," and CrowdStrike was awarded the dubious honor thanks to the software update it launched last month that ended up sparking a global IT outage, the Verge reports. "Definitely not the award to be proud of receiving," Michael Sentonas started off his speech, after accepting what TechCrunch calls a "comically large trophy."

Sentonas said the trophy would be taken to the company's headquarters and given "pride of place" so that every employee who works there will 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 is about," he said. He also explained why he felt it was important to come and accept the award himself: "We got this horribly wrong. ... And 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." (More CrowdStrike stories.)