The judging panel of the Pwnie Awards, which are handed out every year at the Black Hat security conference for achievements and failures in IT security, have recognized the Windows Update hack used by the Flame cyberespionage malware as the most impressive compromise of the past 12 months.
According to the Pwnie Awards website, the "Epic 0wnage" award goes to the hackers responsible for "delivering the most damaging, widely publicized, or hilarious 0wnage."
This year's nominees included:
-- the authors of the Flame malware, for coming up with a novel cryptoanalysis technique to generate a rogue Microsoft code-signing certificate that allowed them to deliver malware as a Windows update;
-- Certificate Authorities (CAs) everywhere, which were described by the Pwnie Awards judges as one massive security vulnerability because several of them were compromised during the past year;
-- and the iOS jailbreakers from the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team, for essentially convincing millions of users to keep their devices unpatched and vulnerable to known critical flaws that are used in the jailbreaks.
