And The Winner Is…

Last Updated on July 28, 2011

The Pwnie Awards is an annual awards ceremony celebrating the achievements and failures of security researchers and the security community.

The awards are given out once an year. The fifth annual ceremony will take place on Aug 3^rd, 2011 in Las Vegas at the BlackHat USA security conference.

In 2011 there will be nine award categories:

Pwnie for Best Server-Side Bug
Pwnie for Best Client-Side Bug
Pwnie for Best Privilege Escalation Bug
Pwnie for Most Innovative Research
Pwnie for Lamest Vendor Response
Pwnie for Best Song
Pwnie for Most Epic FAIL
Pwnie for Lifetime Achievement
Pwnie for Epic Ownage

Do you remember the hacking matrix I posted several days ago, emphasizing impact and innovation as two key factors in hacking? Well, it looks like the panel of the judges did recognized the value of these two factor (together with a certain amount of shallowness in case of Sony).

(Nearly) all the events drawn in the matrix, which happened in 2011 deserved a nominee for the prize, with the exception of Epsilon Data Breach, whose likely category, Most Epic Fail, has been literally monopolized by Sony with 5 nominations.

RSA deserved a nomination as well in the category “Lamest Vendor Response”, while the category Epic Ownage has been monopolized by LulzSec. Even if LulzSec has been appointed only once for “hacking everyone”, there is also a nomination for Anonymous for “hacking HBGary Federal”, probably this is a mistake since it looks clear that HBGary Federal was hacked by the Lulz Boat as well (as also ironically stressed by the LulzSec group itself).

The other two nominations for the Epic Ownage? Bradley Manning and Wikileaks (but I would also have inserted Lady Gaga since a fake Lady Gaga CD was used to perform the leak, and… most of all Stuxnet, who ranked at the top for impact an innovation in this matrix. Stuxnet is considered the first of a new generation of Cyber-weapons even if, so far, no other malware of similar sophistication has been detected (but U.S. Department of Homeland Security fears a modified Stuxnet variant could soon attack U.S. Infrastructure).

Interesting to notice, as suggested by Network World, whoever will win the Epic Ownage prize will be, in theory, a criminal for the law, consequently Law enforcement could be seriously interested to see if anyone actually shows up to this year to accept the prize for Epic Ownage at Black Hat, since all the nominees will face possible criminal charges.

At this link a complete list of the nominations.