Cabrillo College Under 'Brute Force' Hacking Attempts

Cabrillo's director of technology sent a message campuswide asking more than 1,000 employees to change their passwords after almost two dozen accounts were hacked.

According to a memo sent by Dan Borges, starting April 29, 15 email accounts were cracked by an external hacker who then sent 4,000 messages per account to various locations, including Cabrillo and external email addresses.

The attacks have come from different places in the U.S.

The emails appear to come from a valid Cabrillo address and the subject line reads 'Fwd' with no other text. It links to a script file with no text.

Only a couple of employees clicked on the link, which opened viruses into their computers. The school's IT department cleaned those two.

Employees are asked to call the school's help desk at extension 6392 and NOT click on the link.

"These scripts are specifically designed to target organizations, and obtain user credentials to send out malicious emails to others," wrote Borges.

He asked all employees to update passwords with ones that are tougher to crack and sent every employee a link to do so.