Owning Your Mistakes: Crowdstrike wins "Most Epic Fail" Pwnie Award

Mistakes happen. It’s how we handle them that will determine what people think of us.

Crowdstrike Receives “Most Epic Fail” Pwnie Award 🦄

Recently at DEF CON, Crowdstrike was awarded the Pwnie Awards. The Pwnie Awards is “An annual awards ceremony celebrating and making fun of the achievements and failures of security researchers and the wider security community” and one of those events you should try to attend at DEF CON. It’s super entertaining, yet informative and a good way to catch up on the past year’s research and fails (where we can learn).

But I don’t want to talk about Crowdstrike Outage, I want to discuss how the President of Crowdstrike, Micahel Sentonas, handled accepting the award. The mere fact that he leaned into and showed up to accept the award is phenomenal in and of itself.

We can contrast this to how many companies try to hide their Incident Postmortems in fear of bad publicity or hit security researches with Cease and Desist letters, which stifles innovation and doesn’t not promote security research.

Tactics To Help You Acknowledge Mistakes In The Workplace