California community college email and site knocked out after hacker attack

A 12,500-student community college in California has been hit by a hacker attack that brought down the school’s online services and campus phone lines.

College of the Desert – based in Palm Desert, California – did not respond to questions about whether the incident was a ransomware attack, only calling it a “computer network disruption”.

College of the Desert public information officer Nicholas Robles called the incident a “malware attack” in an interview with local newspaper The Desert Sun.

On Twitter and Facebook, the school explained that it is experiencing a systemwide outage of most online services but noted that programs such as Canvas, Adobe, and Microsoft Teams are still available to students.

In a follow up statement, the school said outside experts are working to restore online services and campus phone lines after the attack.

Officials created a temporary website because the original College of the Desert website is currently down. The temporary site has counseling resources and information on summer classes for students. Employees will not be able to connect to their VPN service.

During the outage, College of the Desert said students will not be dropped from classes due to non-payment of fees and confirmed that classes are not being canceled or impacted by the cyber security incident.

In the same time, a massive hacker attack on a software firm continues to ripple through labor and workforce agencies in a number of US states, cutting off people from such services as unemployment benefits and job-seeking programs.