Stop Silly Security Awards

Marketing firms create their own security awards, and some desperate companies pay them to be the winners. Some security awards are sponsored by vendors, who join the judging panel with their vested interests in specific nominees winning. Others still, are judged by people with no domain knowledge. We call these Silly Security Awards, a practice that has been covered in public talks like The security products you deserve and articles like Why you shouldn't give a f*ck about security awards.

These awards aren’t always obvious to spot, but they always make it harder to differentiate between real, and made-up industry recognition. There are lots of variants in the type of awards, but we all know what silly is when we see it. You might know an award is silly when:

• Organized by a marketing or a PR firm
• A company has to pay to participate
• The judging criteria is subjective
• Judging is done by folks that aren't subject matter experts in the space
• Folks running the "competition" reach out to you, like they are selling a product

We want the practice of Silly Security Awards to stop, and so have created a simple page for companies to pledge to not participate. If no one plays the game, this practice will hopefully stop.