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Linux, Twitter, and Red Hat "Win" Big At Pwnie Awards

Posted by Soulskill on from the i'd-like-to-thank-the-academy dept.

hugmeplz writes "The third annual Pwnie Awards took place last night at Black Hat in Las Vegas, and a full list of the winners has been posted. 'Most Epic Fail' honors went to the notorious Twitter/Google Apps hack from earlier this month that raised all sorts of questions about cloud computing security. Red Hat got skewered with the 'Mass 0wnage' award, also known as the 'Pwnie for Breaking the Internet,' for issuing a version of OpenSSH that left a backdoor open to hackers. The Linux development team earned 'Lamest Vendor Response' recognition for 'continually assuming that all kernel memory corruption bugs are only Denial-of-Service.' Naturally, Microsoft didn't slip past judges' eyes. Its vulnerability that enabled the Conficker worm to do its thing earned honors as the 'Most Overhyped Bug.' On the more positive side, the Pwnie Awards recognized security pros Wei Yongjun, sgrakkyu, Sebastian Kramer and Bernhard Mueller for accomplishments such as discovering bugs and demonstrating exploits. The Pwnie for Best Song went to Doctor Braid for his song Nice Report. Solar Designer snagged the Lifetime Achievement Award, for among other things, being the first to demonstrate heap buffer overflow exploitation, according to the Pwnie Awards Web site."

2 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. "Epic Fail?" "Ownage?" by RobotRunAmok · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Help me out with this one: Do they go out of there way to sound like their fourteen years old cuz it's some kind tradition/secret handshake thing, or don't they realize how juvenile and goofy they sound?

  2. Missing award... by gmuslera · · Score: 5, Insightful

    to the ones that hacked their web page and put that fake list of awards.

    Come on, "experts" that calls Linux a "vendor"? That called "overhyped" the bug that enabled Conflicker to do the biggest massive infection of PCs since 2003? Their link to the "backdoored redhat openssh" (that was already discussed here that wasnt) actually links to an advisory about a Windows remote rpc vulnerability.

    Of course, the alternative is that their page is how it was meant to be, and in that case Hanlon would have the real explanation of what happened.