The 20 Worst Possible Banking PINs

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Data analytics company DataGenetics has analyzed nearly 3.4 million leaked four-digit passwords – such as those used for banking or to lock your phone – and figured out which are the most popular.

In other words, these are PINs you should not use, because they’re incredibly predictable…

A staggering 26.83% of all passwords could be guessed by attempting these [top] 20 combinations!

Statistically, with 10,000 possible combination, if passwords were uniformly randomly distributed, we would expect these 20 passwords to account for just 0.2% of the total, not the 26.83% encountered.

Here are the most popular PINs:

Rank PIN Frequency
#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%

Researchers also discovered other interesting patterns – people apparently prefer even numbers to odd ones, for instance. As for the least frequent PINs, 8068 was the rarest combination, used in just 0.000744% of the surveyed passwords. Of course, you don’t want to use that either – as the article notes, “Hackers can read too!”

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