Sony, LulzSec Honored with Pwnies

At the annual Black Hat hacker convention that happened in Las Vegas this week Sony earned a dubious distinction of the security breach that took several of its services down for nearly two months. The awards are called "Pwnies" and - unless you are a hacker - you don’t want to be "honored" with on. Sony earned the "Most Epic Fail" award for the massive security breach that brought down the PlayStation Network and related services for nearly two months earlier this year. Sony had been nominated a whopping five times for the same award, making it the de facto winner no matter what. Obviously no one from Sony was there to accept the award. ,

Dai Zovi, one of the eight judges who picked the winners offered a legal disclaimer for all the Pwnie awards: "We want to make sure that for some of these categories, we're not condoning this type of behavior, but recognizing its significance. Because nothing works more awesome than giving everything your 110%, soaring on your dreams, and making your failing even more epic."

On a less nefarious note, the Pwnie award for best song went to Geohot, for The Light It Up Contest. Other "winners" included RSA, who picked up the "Lamest Vendor Response" award for the SecurID hack; a lifetime achievement award went to pipacs, who is perhaps best known for inventing address space layout randomization (ASLR); security researcher Tarjei Mandt won the "Best Privilege Escalation Bug," for discovering Windows kernel win32k user-mode callback vulnerabilities; Comex won the Pwnie for "Best Client-Side Bug" for an attack that was used to jailbreak iOS devices; Piotr Bania won the Pwnie for most innovative research for taking a document containing recommendations for improving Windows security and implementing them within the kernel drivers in Windows; and LulzSec was honored with the Pwnie for "Epic 0wnage" for "hacking everyone."

Source: Information Week