Microsoft threatened security researchers with legal action for publishing zero-day vulnerabilities, which drew widespread criticism.

Microsoft wins "lamest vendor response" award at this year's Pwnie Awards, for publishing a blog post earlier this year threatening security researchers with legal action if they published zero-days. Also: Meta wins "epic fail" award after its Meta AI hijack bug. By me: https://this.weekinsecurity.com/microsoft-wins-lamest-vendor-at-pwnie-awards-2026-for-threatening-security-researchers-with-legal-action/

"Microsoft has won the "lamest vendor response" category at the Pwnie Awards 2026, the annual award show at Def Con that acknowledges the best and worst in cybersecurity over the past year. The technology giant won the award for publishing a May blog post that threatened security researchers with legal action if they publish zero-days about its products. Microsoft published the blog post following a stream of public reports by a security researcher called “Nightmare Eclipse,” who publicly released details about several zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft's software, which were unknown to the company at the time they were published. The company allegedly ignored the researcher's privately submitted reports. Microsoft's blog post drew widespread criticism, in part because security researchers still get threatened a lot for their work. Microsoft eventually backtracked, but clearly not sufficiently enough to regain the trust it lost from the security community, as evidenced by this award." https://this.weekinsecurity.com/microsoft-wins-lamest-vendor-at-pwnie-awards-2026-for-threatening-security-researchers-with-legal-action/ #CyberSecurity #Hacking #DEFCON #PwnieAwards #Microsoft