MEO Data Breach

What happened

In early 2023, a corpus of data sourced from the New Zealand based face mask company MEO was discovered. Dating back to December 2020, the data contained over 8k customer records including names, addresses, phone numbers and passwords stored as MD5 Wordpress hashes. MEO did not respond to multiple attempts to report the breach.

Exposed data

Recommended actions

• Change your MEO password immediately, and update it anywhere you reused the same password.
• Enable two-factor authentication on the affected account and on your critical services (email, banking).
• Watch for targeted phishing emails referencing MEO — attackers weaponise breach data quickly.
• Stay alert for smishing (SMS phishing) and SIM-swap attempts using your phone number.
• Exposed identity data raises identity-theft risk — consider credit monitoring or a credit freeze.