Some of the least popular passwords included two-digit sequences with “larger numerical gaps between them” such as 29 and 37. However, selecting a PIN is also influenced by visual keypad layout clues like 2580 which runs down the center of an ATM or phone. Repeating pairs in the XYXY format made up 17.8% of all PINs. There were 6,775468 all numeric 4-10 digit passwords in the database I used.” He was traveling and couldn’t tap into his database right then, but he filtered the all-numeric passwords from a staggering list of “ close to 100 million!” It's super sad on a security scale to know that many were stored in an unencrypted form.īesides 1, people also “love to start their PIN numbers with 0.” There were the usual uninspired choices like 1234, patterns like 1212 or 1122, and repeating digits like 1111 or 0000. Nick Berry, president of Data Genetics, told me, “There were 3,359,402 four digit all numeric passwords in the database I used. Thinking of all the hacks, breaches and compromises in the last year alone, I was curious about the total number of passwords Data Genetics analyzed. “I hope, hope that the people who have passwords of nine digits long are not using their Social Security Numbers!” “Six-digit codes are the next most popular length, followed by eight,' Data Genetics wrote. About half of the 7 million all-numeric passwords were four-digit codes. 'I hope this article will scare you into being a little more careful in how you select your next PIN number,' the researchers said. These top 20 passwords made up almost 27% of the dataset. Since each of the 10,000 combinations from 0000 – 9999 were used, it made truth of the Pastebin prank ' All credit card PIN codes in the world leaked.' That joke and an XKCD cartoon inspired the analysis. Instead, it is the most popular first digit for a PIN. As you can see in the graph on the right, '1' is most assuredly not the loneliest number.

Pins for hats 420