the Pwnie Awards
loresecurityevents
The security industry's annual awards, handed out at Black Hat since 2007 as a gold-painted toy pony - honouring the year's best server-side and client-side bugs alongside categories no one wants to win, chiefly Lamest Vendor Response and Most Epic Fail.
The Pwnies are the field's self-policing mechanism dressed as a joke: a vendor that bullies a researcher or dismisses a real bug gets its name read aloud to a ballroom of the people it depends on. Winning the technical categories is a genuine career marker; the shame categories have changed disclosure behaviour more than several regulations.
Also known as: pwnies, most epic fail, lamest vendor response