One of the great things about Black Hat is that even though security is serious business, the conference organizers have never taken themselves too seriously. Amazingly, that’s still the case now that the conference is owned by a large media conglomerate. Exhibit A would be the fact that conference founder Jeff Moss not only donated space for the Pwnie Awards, but he was sitting right up front laughing and mixing it up with the researchers who were busily throwing verbal bombs at vendors, many of whom are sponsors of the conference.

The Pwnie Awards ceremony was without question the highlight of Day One at Black Hat. Dave Goldsmith, Dave Aitel, Dino Dai Zovi, HD Moore and Alexander Sotirov spent about an hour honoring the best research in the last couple of years while trashing vendors, poking fun at themselves and the winners and trying desperately to give away all of the gold-painted plastic ponies that served as the trophies. Aitel went all out for the occasion, showing up with the name of his company, Immunity, shaved into the back of his head. Who won in each of the categories was almost beside the point, although, as predicted here first, the painful “Symantec Revolution” won for best song.

The best acceptance speech has to go to Skape, who won two of the awards, but wasn’t at the conference. So he thanked the crowd and judges via a cell phone held up to the microphone.

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