We Were Targeted by a Phishing Attack.

Christopher Geary
May 19
2 min read

Here's What Happened — And What We're Doing to Protect Our Community.

Last week, one of our team members at Young Founders School fell victim to a phishing scam.

They received a normal email from our CEO requesting a gift card. The message sounded urgent, and they responded (see the email below)

What they didn’t notice was that the sender's address wasn’t from our official Young Founders School domain — it came from @optimum.net, a domain well known for being used in phishing scams. Unfortunately, they sent the requested gift cards before the scammer stopped replying.

As it turns out, they weren’t alone. Over the past few days, we’ve uncovered a broader phishing attempt:

9 emails were sent to YFS addresses, but Google Spam filters caught them all.
In more than one case, the scam email was also sent to the individual's personal Gmail account.
In one instance, a person using their personal emails replied to the scammer, believing it was real

So, was this a breach?

So far, no. Some of the emails that were used are not even stored in our systems. Nevertheless, we are grateful for Blackpanda's incident response service, which will conduct a thorough review over the next few days.

We believe the attackers are scraping publicly available data (e.g. LinkedIn job updates) to construct believable impersonation attempts — a common tactic in phishing campaigns like the Razer Gold scam (see example).

What we're doing about it

We’ve responded quickly, and decisively:

Reset all passwords across all YFS accounts.
Blocked emails from the optimum.net domain
Launched an internal awareness campaign for our entire team and mentor community. You will be soon receiving emails
We are updating our email footers to include scam prevention tips
Preparing a cyber training module, which will be mandatory for all team members and partners.
Partnered with Black Panda, a leading cybersecurity firm, who are conducting a full incident response scan pro bono for which we are deeply grateful
Publishing this post and a summary to LinkedIn and our website to keep our community informed

Moving forward: better systems, more awareness

The reality is that these types of scams aren’t going away. And the best defence is a vigilant team.

The good news is that we’ve already been building a stronger security posture this year:

Mandatory 90-day password resets
Required use of 1Password for secure credential storage
Organisation-wide use of Norton Antivirus
A “Least Privileged” data access policy, with documents segmented across three levels of access

We’re also taking this opportunity to build a cyber safety module for our students, because we believe digital literacy is now a core life skill. Until then, we’re pointing students and families to Singapore’s Cyber Crime Division, which offers excellent, free training resources.

What you can do

If you're part of the YFS community, a student, mentor, parent, or partner, here’s how you can help:

Never send money or gift cards based on an email or WhatsApp message unless you’ve verified it via phone or in person.
Check the sender's email address carefully - scammers often impersonate names.
Report anything suspicious to the YFS team at info@youngfoundersschool.com.