KYBER CENA ROKU 2025: the biggest evening of Czech cybersecurity this year.

We live in a world where it’s normal to run a company from your phone, learn via YouTube, and talk with artificial intelligence as naturally as with a colleague or a friend. The digital space has long ceased to be "somewhere on the side." It’s the environment where we work, raise our children, and often succeed or fail. That is precisely why the KYBER CENA ROKU competition was created: to highlight the people and projects that make the Czech Republic safer.

The third annual awards took place on October 9, 2025, at a gala evening attended by an expert jury, partners and finalists from education, public administration, industry and commercial security. This year it was about much more than trophies. You could feel the confidence of the whole community.

"Cybersecurity is not just about technology – above all it’s about people and processes," said the official opening of the evening. The competition aims to spotlight exactly those people: teachers, managers, talents, organizations, projects and entire schools that decided to raise cybersecurity to a higher level.

KYBER TALENT ROKU 2025: František Hrubý

This year the KYBER TALENT ROKU award went to a student of Smíchovská střední průmyslová škola a gymnázium, František Hrubý.

His first reaction? Absolute honesty.

"Primarily I feel extremely surprised, because I really didn’t expect it at all," he says. "I went there thinking I’d just pick up that little diploma and go back home. I certainly don’t see this award as the final point of my career. I take it mainly as an impulse to be much better than I am now... and to go much, much higher."

František today does not act only as a student. He has taught programming at his home school, has work experience in public administration, and aims high: "I would like one day to strategically manage cybersecurity in this country and help improve how things are here."

What makes his achievement even more interesting is that he’s not a "solo act." Smíchovská průmyslovka, his school, won too.

KYBER ŠKOLA ROKU 2025: Smíchovská střední průmyslová škola a gymnázium

Smíchovská SPŠ a gymnázium became KYBER ŠKOLOU ROKU. The school principal Radko Sáblík commented without big gestures, emphasizing the team instead:

"This is not my victory. It is above all the victory of our teachers, alumni and students," he says.

What’s behind the school’s success? Sáblík describes a simple but still quite radical approach in Czech education: give trust to those closest to reality.

"We have built a great community that is creative and self-learning. Students really teach each other, take on responsibility and are encouraged not to wait for instructions from above but to start projects themselves," he explains.

In practice this means students and recent graduates teach younger years, routinely lead projects and get involved in real practice while still studying. "I currently have about 94 teachers at the school. Of those, 48 are my alumni aged 19 to 28 and there are even 7 senior-year students who already teach lower years," Sáblík says.

The result? It’s not just a trophy. After four years of this "study–do–teach others" model, 47.5% of students graduated with honors this year. "The key isn’t sitting in a desk and cramming. The key is that they learned how to learn, they have intrinsic motivation and they know how to manage time and priorities," Sáblík adds.

KYBER UČITEL ROKU 2025: Jan Kolouch

The KYBER UČITEL ROKU 2025 award went to Jan Kolouch. In interviews it was noted that his work has a direct impact on parents and thus on children — the most vulnerable group.

"Amazing. Incredible award, thank you so much," he said after accepting the prize.

He describes his work simply: "I try to teach, to pass information on." For a long time he has focused on parents and their relationship to the digital world of children – grooming, manipulation, social networks, addictions, peer pressure, influencer pressure.

And he has a warning: although people "talk about children's cybersecurity more than before," parents often treat it a bit like watching a dog on a camera. The child is home, has a phone and they think "they’re fine" — and that’s the end of it.

"Unfortunately I don’t see parents taking it more seriously overall," Kolouch says. "There was a leap after the film V síti, there was a leap after COVID, but then it subsides again. Parents often don’t think about what’s happening around that phone."

A memorable moment of the evening: when we asked him whom he would give the award to, without hesitation he answered: "Spike. Definitely. Because what he does, and really the way he does it, is very similar to me. I really enjoy it, so I would wish that for him."

KYBER PROJEKT ROKU 2025: BUTCA

The KYBER PROJEKT ROKU award was taken home by the BUTCA project.

"We are definitely very happy, we are very grateful," came the reaction right after the announcement. This was no accident or one-off burst. The BUTCA team reached the finals two years ago. Now they took gold — and the reason is clear: scaling.

"Over the past two years we have worked hard to get the platform to the wider public, to other schools and universities. And we succeeded. Now it’s used by a number of schools, including foreign universities."

BUTCA now doesn’t want to "just keep running," but genuinely step out of the Czech sandbox. "We want to expand the platform’s use, get it into more schools and companies. And we plan to establish a spin-off within the BUTCA platform," the team says. They also mentioned a presentation in Nuremberg and the ambition to grow into an independent entity.

KYBER MANAŽER ROKU 2025: Pavel Rivola

The KYBER MANAŽER ROKU category honors people who keep security running in large organizations. This year’s winner was Pavel Rivola, Head of Security at CETIN.

"Surprising, pleasant. Surprising," he summed up his feelings after the announcement. His name is known even outside internal security communities — mainly because he openly shares cases, attack analyses and "lessons learned" on LinkedIn for others.

Why does he do it? "I think that if you are the head of security, you should know what the current state is in the world," he explains. He adds a practical dimension: his posts often serve colleagues at other companies as ammunition in budget and security measure negotiations.

"I’ve received feedback a few times that people are interested in how I describe the attackers’ modus operandi. They then use those arguments in discussions with their management: why you need this, who this happened to. A story is more powerful than a table."

And whom would he give the award to? Without long hesitation he picked one name: "Teacher Sebastian Garcia."

KYBER ORGANIZACE ROKU 2025: Ministerstvo práce a sociálních věcí

The evening concluded with public administration. The KYBER ORGANIZACE 2025 award was taken by Ministerstvo práce a sociálních věcí (MPSV) — confirming that cybersecurity in state institutions can reach a European level.

MPSV was nominated in four categories this year and succeeded in all of them. Besides the main victory in KYBER ORGANIZACE ROKU, its security director Jan Mikulecký placed in the TOP 3 in the KYBER MANAŽER ROKU category and also won the KYBER CENA VEŘEJNOSTI. František Hrubý, this year’s KYBER TALENT ROKU who worked there while studying, also comes from MPSV.

Today the ministry operates one of the most extensive ICT infrastructures in the Czech Republic — more than 25,000 users, over 400 branches, three data centers with Microsoft Azure cloud integration, 5,000 servers and 3,000 network devices. More than 700 administrators are involved in securing this ecosystem, of which approximately 450 are contractors, making MPSV one of the largest IT teams in public administration.

At a time when state institutions are frequent targets of cyberattacks, this is a result worth noting. The MPSV team handles hundreds of incidents annually, eliminates over half a million technical vulnerabilities, blocks more than 1.5 million malicious emails and conducts dozens of security tests. This comprehensive approach makes MPSV a leader in public-sector cybersecurity — a clear proof that modern public administration can be not only functional but also secure.

A strong moment of the evening: Sebastian Garcia

Sebastian Garcia was a finalist this year in the KYBER UČITEL ROKU category. He teaches, popularizes the topic, builds open education and does it in a way that attracts thousands of people across generations.

"It was very impressive, I’m extremely happy. I didn’t expect this level of support for the topic," he said after the ceremony. In the past year his team taught over 2,700 people in a free online course – and their ambitions go further.

"Next year we want to expand that reach even more – more countries, more people. And we want to prepare our own books as study material. We’re thinking about getting more into publishing," Garcia explains. Interestingly, his courses now attract not only university students but also high school students — and even people who have never been to university. This is exactly the type of open education this competition aims to showcase.

Garcia was also among the most popular figures of the evening with the audience. In the KYBER CENA VEŘEJNOSTI category voting he finished in a shared first place. The final decision about who would take the trophy was made by a draw — and it went to Jan Mikulecký. That detail provoked a spontaneous reaction in the hall and honestly showed that Garcia resonates not only with the expert jury but also with the broader community.

And whom would Sebastian give the award to? Without hesitation he named František Hrubý. "To be in high school, have that energy, keep that pace and still work for the state… wow. I’m very curious where he’ll get to."

Why it all makes sense

KYBER CENA ROKU is not just another gala with partner logos on the screen. It’s a joint project of business, the state, schools and communities. The main partners of this year’s edition were Cisco Systems, EY and Corpus Solutions. Expert guarantors include, among others, the AFCEA cybersecurity working group and Národní úřad pro kybernetickou a informační bezpečnost. The competition has the official patronage of Ministerstvo vnitra ČR, Ministerstva školství a tělovýchovy, Velitelství informačních a kybernetických sil and Národní pedagogický institut.

This matters. Not because it looks good in a press release, but because cybersecurity is no longer a closed world of "the IT department in the basement." Today it’s national defense, it’s protection of industry, it’s educating children, it’s corporate reputation and it’s the competitiveness of the whole country.

And it’s a community. This year it was visible physically as well: "I was surprised how big it is, the beautiful hall, the atmosphere… and above all it was full of people it makes sense to talk to," described the evening the freshly named KYBER MANAŽER ROKU Pavel Rivola.

What’s next

The organizers announced that the next edition of the competition will run again in six categories and nominations will open in January 2026. The goal is clear: not only to hand out awards, but to continue raising respect for the field and show that cybersecurity is normal, important and above all a human discipline.

Every year there are more people who treat cybersecurity as a mission, not just a profession. KYBER CENA ROKU shows that behind the technologies are human stories, courage and cooperation — and that Czech cybersecurity is maturing. It’s no longer just a technical field but a culture of responsibility.

And we will continue to map it, record it and share it with you.