March 29, 2019 - Planning a funeral isn't something that's fun. That's especially true for anyone planning their own funeral. And because funeral costs have skyrocketed - buying a new car can be less expensive (and a lot more fun) - many families are now turning to cremation as a less expensive alternative. The last think you would probably think about when making these plans is the possibility of identity theft. But that thought now has to be on the minds of customer of the Cremation Society of Pennsylvania (CSP).

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To be fair, the possible data breach in question hasn't been linked to any cases of ID theft or privacy intrusions yet.

CSP was shipping customer data from one location to another on a storage device. The shipment was sent via UPS and arrived as scheduled. Only one problem. When the package arrived, the storage device was missing.

The company believes that the package was damaged in transit and that the device was lost at that time. It was probably a thumb drive or an SD card. For anyone who uses these devices, it's easy to understand how something so small could be lost and nobody would realize it. In fact, in the case of an SD card, it probably wouldn't make any noise at all as it hit the ground.

That doesn’t' alter the fact that devices like this can hold a lot of data. In this case, data on more than 24,000 customers which included names, addresses and SSN's; more than enough to commit ID theft. And because the company's announcement didn't mention encryption, customer should assume that anyone who finds the missing device will have no issue when it comes to accessing the stored data on it.

CSP has filed a missing item report with UPS. And UPS will destroy the device if they find it. In the meantime, CSP is warning its clients about the breach and offering a year of credit monitoring to customers for free.

Anyone who believes that their data may have been compromised in this breach should start monitoring their credit reports regularly.

byJim Malmberg

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