Welcome to the first-ever IT Audit Awards Gala, the only event where people voluntarily gather to discuss firewall configurations, privileged access and the dangers of USB drives! Held at the magnificent “Zero Trust Conference Hall,” conveniently located inside a Faraday cage (because security first!), tonight’s ceremony is set to recognize the unsung heroes of cybersecurity, governance and risk management.
As our esteemed host, Professor Segregation-of-Duties, steps up to the stage (after passing through a multi-factor authentication checkpoint), he greets the audience with a timeless IT audit joke:
"Before we begin, let’s take a moment to appreciate our internal controls ... because the developers sure didn’t!"
These awards come to you directly from The Society for Auditing Everything That Connects (S.A.E.T.C.).
The S.A.E.T.C. is the global organization behind the IT Audit Awards—the only society where every connection is audited, every vulnerability is exposed, and every password is questioned (yes, even that one you swear you wrote down on a sticky note under your keyboard).
Their motto? “We don’t trust anyone… but we’ll audit you anyway.” We’d say we trust but verify, but that’s just our process—nothing personal.
And now … the IT Audit Awards!
The “I Told You So” Award
Winner: The IT auditor who, years ago, warned that the company’s outdated VPN solution was a security risk. After a high-profile cyberattack, they simply nodded and said, “I documented this in a report three years ago.”
The “Incident Responder of the Year” Award
Winner: The IT auditor who stayed up all night during a security breach, frantically tracing logs, only to realize the root cause was “Admin” using "P@ssw0rd123" as their password.
The “Best Audit Finding Description” Award
Winner: “The firewall configuration is so weak that my grandmother could pivot through the network, and she still uses Internet Explorer.”
The “Phantom Access” Award
Winner: The IT auditor who found that ex-employees from 2012 still had active admin accounts on the company’s servers. When asked why, IT Support replied, “Oh, we just never got around to deactivating those.”
Best “Technically Correct but Useless” Audit Recommendation
We recommend implementing a comprehensive security framework aligned with industry best practices, utilizing a risk-based approach for optimal cyber resilience.”
(Translation: Good luck figuring that out.)
The “Longest Audit Report” Award
Winner: The firm that produced a 400-page SOC 2 report, in which the executive summary alone required a risk assessment to understand.
The “Most Innovative Finding” Award
Winner: The team that discovered that the “secure” company network password policy required users to change their password every 30 days … which led to everyone using “Password1,” then “Password2,” then “Password3” …
After-party at the “Patch Management Lounge”
The Awards after-party is at the “Patch Management Lounge,” where the Wi-Fi password is updated every 30 seconds, and no one trusts it enough to even Google a pizza place. You’ll find our “Security Team Special” cocktail, made of “One part encryption, one part denial of service, and a splash of coffee from a machine still running on Windows XP.”
And with that, another year of IT auditing excellence comes to a close. But don’t worry—we’ll be back next year, when another outdated system mysteriously reappears in the network, and we all gather again to say, “Wait … didn’t we decommission that?”
