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

Aug 25, 2024

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.

CrowdStrike accepting the @PwnieAwards for “most epic fail” at @defcon. Class act.
— Dominic White 👾 (@singe)
5:31 PM • Aug 10, 2024

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

I recently came across Shade Zahrai, one of the most eloquent communication and workplace experts I have seen as of late. Her social media is chock full of excellent actionable and science based tips to help you navigate any challenge.

Below are some great tips on how to acknowledge mistakes in the workplace.

Shadé Zahrai MBA LLB on LinkedIn: #communication | 85 comments

Ever caught yourself over-apologizing at work? There’s a risk… Those unnecessary “sorries” can actually chip away at your credibility, a pitfall that could be… | 85 comments on LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com/posts/shadezahrai_communication-activity-7132599762935037952-DUxl

Blameless Postmortems

As mentioned, mistakes are inevitable. We can choose to be defensive about it and act like nothing happened, or acknowledge, find the root cause, and move on.

It’s quite important to remove “blame” from the equation so people can have a safe environment to admit mistakes without fear. One example of that is the Blameless methodology of Postmortems.

I won’t go into that here, but below are some resources for you to chew on that can help you no matter what role you are in your company.