Categories: Business & Tech News

SOLVED: Most Common PIN Codes & Passwords… Don’t Use These!

DataGenics.com took a look at 10000 pin codes they assembled from various leaked data sets.  The results are amazing:

 

I was able to find almost 3.4 million four digit passwords.   Every single one of the of the 10,000 combinations of digits from 0000 through to 9999 were represented in the dataset.

The next most popular 4-digit PIN in use is  1111   with over 6% of passwords being this.

In third place is  0000  with almost 2%.

A table of the top 20 found passwords in shown at the right.  A staggering 26.83% of all passwords could be guessed by attempting these 20 combinations!

(Statistically, with 10,000 possible combination, if passwords were uniformly randomly distributed, we would expect the these twenty passwords to account for just 0.2% of the total, not the 26.83% encountered)

Looking more closely at the top few records, all the usual suspects are present  1111   2222   3333  …  9999  as well as  1212  and (snigger)  6969 .

It’s not a surprise to see patterns like  1122  and  1313  occurring high up in the list, nor  4321  or  1010 .

2001  makes an appearance at #19.  1984  follows not far behind in position #26, and James Bond fans may be interested to know  0007  is found between the two of them in position #23 (another variant  0070  follows not much further behind at #28).

The first “puzzling” password I encountered was  2580  in position #22.   What is the significance of these digits? Why should so many people select this code to make it appear so high up the list?  Then I realized that  2580 is a straight down the middle of a telephone keypad!

PIN Freq
#1 1234 10.713%
#2 1111 6.016%
#3 0000 1.881%
#4 1212 1.197%
#5 7777 0.745%
#6 1004 0.616%
#7 2000 0.613%
#8 4444 0.526%
#9 2222 0.516%
#10 6969 0.512%
#11 9999 0.451%
#12 3333 0.419%
#13 5555 0.395%
#14 6666 0.391%
#15 1122 0.366%
#16 1313 0.304%
#17 8888 0.303%
#18 4321 0.293%
#19 2001 0.290%
#20 1010 0.285%

Read his full analysis at: datagenetics.com/blog/september32012

As for passwords take a look at this:

Here (is) the list compiled by SplashData:

1. password

2. 123456

3.12345678

4. qwerty

5. abc123

6. monkey

7. 1234567

8. letmein

9. trustno1

10. dragon

11. baseball

12. 111111

13. iloveyou

14. master

15. sunshine

16. ashley

17. bailey

18. passwOrd

19. shadow

20. 123123

21. 654321

22. superman

23. qazwsx

24. michael

25. football

For more details on the most common passwords read the full article HERE.

Published by
Ian Matthews

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