The 2025 Pwnie Awards
Ian Roos, Mark Trumpbour
DEF CON 33 (backfill) · Day 1 · Main Stage
The 2025 Pwnie Awards, presented at DEF CON, served as a vibrant and often humorous retrospective on the most significant achievements, spectacular failures, and critical vulnerabilities discovered within the cybersecurity landscape over the past year. Hosted primarily by Ian Roos and Mark Trumpbour, with a rotating cast of community presenters, the awards celebrate the researchers, engineers, and hackers who push the boundaries of offensive and defensive security. Far from a conventional awards ceremony, the Pwnies are a purely volunteer-driven effort, known for their candid commentary, inside jokes, and a genuine appreciation for groundbreaking work.
AI review
The Pwnie Awards are an institution, not a talk — a community ritual that functions as a year-in-review for people already living in this space. What's here is a competent write-up of a ceremony, not research, and should be judged accordingly: it surfaces real signal (AMD Entry Sign, regreSSHion, the quadruple race condition LPE) with enough technical color to be useful, but it's inherently retrospective and derivative by design.