Have you noticed Captchas on some of our forms and wondered why they have suddenly appeared? Captchas are the little pictures of number/letter combinations that you need to enter before submitting a form. Captchas have been added because UC Berkeley servers have been under repeated attack by form submission bots.
The purpose of these malicious attacks is to disable our servers and perhaps gain entry to them. What we see are hundreds, or even thousands, of form submissions all occurring within a very short time period (perhaps only a few minutes). At the very least, it is quite a task to verify and delete all these emails.
Our I.T. folks are now requiring Captchas to be added to our web forms, such as our Document Delivery and Literature Search request forms. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.