Hero Awards Winner: Brevard Public Schools - Cybersecurity

Everyone likes a good scare on Halloween, but for the Brevard Public Schools IT team, October of 2020 brought a scare they’d never before experienced. At 10 p.m. on Halloween night, Barrett Puschus, the Director of IT for Brevard Public Schools, received a call from an unknown number. Because he was outside listening to music with his family, he ignored the call, only to see a message appear in his inbox. When he listened to the message, the Microsoft DART team (Microsoft’s cybersecurity arm) let him know it had flagged the Brevard School system with metrics that indicated the district was experiencing the onset of a ransomware attack.