Data Breach: What To Do After Your Personal Information Is Exposed - Digital Reviews Network

The personal data of customers of the toilet paper brand Who Gives A Crap was accessed without authorisation following a security incident involving one of its marketing software providers. The exposed information included first and last names, email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses, and the total amount spent with the company. Payment details, passwords, and individual order information were not included.

Who Gives A Crap confirmed that its customer accounts were not directly accessed and there is no evidence of misuse so far. The company’s main warning is that scammers may use the real personal information to make phishing messages considerably more convincing.

NETGEAR’s Head of Product Security Chandan Nandakumaraiah had originally offered to comment on the issue but was ultimately unavailable. The company instead provided written responses to questions about what consumers should do after a data breach.

The first step after discovering a breach is to act quickly and assess exactly what information was involved. Not every breach is equal, and the risk depends on the type of data exposed. NETGEAR says that where passwords have been exposed, consumers should change the password on the affected account and every other account where the same password has been reused. Multi-factor authentication should also be enabled where available.

In the case of Who Gives A Crap, the company uses a challenge code sent to the registered email address to authenticate account access, rather than a traditional account password. Because passwords were not involved, there is no password for the customer to change here. The risk simply changes, as someone now potentially has enough information to know the customer’s name, where they live, how to contact them, and that they have an existing relationship with the company.

This creates context, and context is what makes a scam believable. A scam no longer needs to guess very much. Imagine receiving an email saying, “We’re contacting you regarding your Who Gives A Crap account following the recent security incident. Our records show you’ve spent $XXX with us. You’re eligible for a refund. Please confirm your details below.” The amount, name, email address, and postal address might all be correct.

That changes the psychology of the message. Instead of looking like some random scam sent to millions of people, it starts looking like somebody actually knows something about you. For years, people were told to look for bad grammar, spelling mistakes, broken logos, and strangely formatted emails. Those signs still exist, but NETGEAR says they are no longer reliable indicators on their own. Phishing messages can now appear polished and convincing, and generative AI only makes that easier.

An attacker no longer needs to be particularly good at writing English to produce a professional-looking message. And if the person behind the scam already has pieces of real information about you, the message can be tailored far more effectively. That shifts the focus away from how the message looks and towards whether the request itself makes sense.

NETGEAR recommends treating unexpected requests, unfamiliar login attempts, suspicious links, and unusual activity with caution. Messages that pressure people into acting quickly or disclosing information deserve particular scrutiny. Consumers should also verify the request through a separate, trusted route instead of responding to the message directly, clicking the link it provides, or calling the phone number contained in it.

Who Gives A Crap says it will never ask for payment details by email or text message and will not contact affected customers by phone. So if somebody calls claiming to be from the company about the breach, that is already a very large red flag. The same principle applies more broadly. If your bank emails you, open the banking app independently. If a retailer appears to offer a refund, type the retailer’s address into your browser yourself.

The more real information scammers obtain from breaches, the less useful superficial checks become. The message may look perfect, but the request can still be fake. This raises the question of how useful dark web monitoring is after a breach has already happened.

Dark web monitoring scans breach sources and the dark web for exposed personal information and then alerts users when their details are found. Data from breaches can hang around for years, getting copied, repackaged, combined with other databases, and resurfaced again later. A useful dark web monitoring service should provide context rather than merely saying that something has been detected. That can include the breach source and date where known, the type of information exposed, and an indication of the potential threat level.

That matters because a five-year-old email address appearing in a recycled breach database is very different from current credentials suddenly appearing in a new dataset. A new source, recent date, or different type of exposed information may point to a new incident. And where it is unclear, the safest response is to treat it as genuine and take the recommended security steps anyway.

NETGEAR acknowledges that dark web monitoring cannot remove information from external websites or criminal marketplaces. It also cannot stop another organisation from suffering a breach. Dark web monitoring is not a cure; it is an early-warning system. It may tell you that information has appeared somewhere, help identify which information is involved, and provide enough context to understand whether the exposure is new or old. And it may give you a chance to act before somebody successfully uses that information against you.

Once information has escaped, monitoring cannot magically pull it back. Once somebody else has a copy, there may be no practical way to make every copy disappear. The router still matters too. As homes fill with cameras, speakers, televisions, appliances, sensors, and other connected devices, the router remains one of the most important pieces of the security puzzle. NETGEAR describes the router as the “front door” for every connected device in the home and says one of the more common mistakes households make is setting it up once and then effectively forgetting about it.

NETGEAR recommends checking that the router is still supported by its manufacturer, keeping firmware current, and using WPA3 encryption where available.