“All credit card PIN numbers in the World leaked” – nearly 11% of the 3.4 million passwords are 1234
Datagenetics got hold of 3.4 million leaked 4-digit pins, they then did some pin number analysis to give us the worst and best pins.
Obviously, by doing this they’ve inevitably made the best pins some of the worst, however this is what they found out:
- 11% of the 3.4 million passwords are 1234
- 6% of passwords are 1111
- Almost 2% of passwords are 0000
- The top 20 most common passwords account for 26.83% of all passwords, if passwords were uniformly randomly distributed, we would expect these twenty passwords to account for just 0.2% of the total, showing just how many people use stupid pins.
- In that list of 20 all the usual suspects are present 1111…2222…3333…9999 & of course 1212 and 6969 (hehe)
Then later followed by 1122 and 1313 & 4321 and 1010
2001 at #19, 1984 at #26 & 0007 at #23 - Then an apparent anomaly 2580 at #22, it seems quite random until you realise that it’s the numbers straight down the middle of a phone keypadSo you might be able to crack over 10% of all codes with one guess! Expanding this, you could get 20% by using just five numbers. one third of all codes can be guessed by trying just 61 distinct combinations!
Dates of Birth or anniversaries are also common, every single 19?? combination can be found in the top fifth of the dataset!
The ratio of the peak of 1972 usage compared to the average of all the other ??72 PINS gives you a ratio of 22:1 – So this proves people are actively using memorable years for their pins. It would be fairly easy for hackers to find out your age and then try and use that information to increase the chances of your pin being correctly guessed.
People love to start their PIN numbers with 0, and even more so with the digit 1.You can read more about this on Data Genetics
