Pwnie Awards reflects a 'great' year for hackers

Updated:  The Pwnie results are in.  The awards were held in Las Vegas on August 3, and Sony won (or lost) the Most Epic Fail category. Five times.

The company was nominated five times in the category for various fails this year, including the PSN's falling over to a hack that stole millions of user's personal (and possibly credit card) details, and the suing of the hacker GeoHot who worked out how to jailbreak the PS3, and now works for Facebook (go figure).

GeoHot also won the Pwnie for Best Song 'The Light It Up Contest', which starts "Yo it's GeoHot".

And Most Epic 0wnage was taken out by the Stuxnet worm, which brought down power plants in Iran thought to be used in its nuclear programme.

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The Anonymous, Lulzsec and Stuxnet hackers have been nominated in the annual Pwnie Awards for Epic Ownage - reflecting a "great" year for hackers.

Anonymous' exploits included hacking the Internal Affairs website here; Lulzsec broke into News Corp servers to publish a fake front page of the Sun; while Stuxnet's creators (rumoured to be allied to the US government) hit systems at Iran's nuclear programme.

For readers unfamiliar with leetspeak, the infinitive ‘to pwn’ means to own, or conquer. 

The Pwnie Awards are described as “an annual awards ceremony celebrating the achievements and failures of security researchers and the security community.”

They were founded in 2007, reportedly after the two founders, now judges, discussed vulnerabilities they had found in various software. 

The awards are handed out once a year in categories including ‘Most Epic FAIL’ and ‘Epic 0wnage’ (the noun of the above).

This year’s awards will be held in Las Vegas at the BlackHat USA security conference on August 3^rd and the nominees are formidable.

In the Epic 0wnage category, which the awards say is measured in ‘owws’, Anonymous are nominated for their hack of HBGary Federal, which resulted in thousands of private emails and documents being published online, after its chief executive said he would sell alleged details of Anonymous members to the FBI.

Also nominated are Lulzsec for “hacking everyone” including Fox News, Nintendo and the US Senate.

Wikileaks and its whistleblower Bradley Manning (allegedly) are also nominated, as are the Stuxnet creators, whose worm caused physical damage to Iranian power plants, said to be used in the nuclear programme.

And in the Most Epic FAIL category, Sony stands alone, nominated five times for, the Pwnie Awards say, suing the hacker who worked out how to jailbreak the PS3, for failing to protect their Playstation Network adequately and thus allowing users’ personal and credit card details to be stolen, for shutting down said network for about two months to rebuild it, and for laying off a number of its cyber security team just before the hack.

There is also a Best Song category including raps titled Eatin’ Cookies and a parody of Rebecca Black’s song ‘Friday’, called ‘0-day’, with lyrics

“Today i-is 0-day, 0-day

Tomorrow is 1-day

Defenses come after-wards

I don't want this 0-day to end”