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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