The most common PINs were found in a database of 29 million records. If you find yours, it’s better to change it, as fraudsters know about them too.
According to a recent analysis, one in ten people use the same four-digit PIN to protect their smartphones and other personal digital devices. ABC News examined 29 million PINs in the Have I Been Pwned database and found some worrying trends.
The most frequent PINs are surprisingly predictable, a real gift for attackers. The popularity of the 1234-digit combination password is unprecedented: it seems that people really don’t care about their own security. further, every tenth person uses the simplest PINs of one or two digits: 0000, 1111, 1212, 4444, etc.
Birth years are another common source of weak PINs. Years such as 1986 and 2004 are in the top twenty. People also often choose obvious sequences in reverse order, like 4321. Even combinations that may seem tricky, like 1342, are actually easy-to-guess patterns that no criminal would miss. By the way, here are all 50 PINs (which the author of the news was not too lazy to copy piece by piece, with a sense of satisfaction that he did not find his own among them):
1234 1111 0000 1342 1212 2222 4444 1122 1986 2020 7777 5555 1989 9999 6969 2004 1010 4321 6666 1984 1987 1985 8888 2000 1980 1988 1982 2580 1313 1990 1991 1983 1978 1979 1995 1994 1977 1981 3333 1992 1975 2005 1993 1976 1996 2002 1973 2468 1998 1974
A four-digit PIN offers as many as 10,000 possible combinations, and people tend to use the simplest ones, which effectively negate security. This predictability leads to a huge 1 in 8 chance of being hacked.
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