Don't use these three ATM PIN codes
Cracking Your PIN Code: Easy as 1-2-3-4
Yahoo!
editors have selected this article as a favorite of 2012. It first appeared on
Yahoo! Finance in September and was one of the most popular stories of the
month. Readers joked about people who use the most common PIN codes, and shared
how they came up with their own. "My pin number is my post office box
number from my time in the Air Force 30 years ago on a base that no longer
exists," wrote user Nick. "Feel free to hack that."
If
you lost your ATM card on the street, how easy would it be for someone to
correctly guess your PIN and proceed to clean out your savings account? Quite
easy, according to data scientist Nick Berry, founder of Data Genetics, a
Seattle technology consultancy.
Berry
analyzed passwords from previously released and exposed tables and security
breaches, filtering the results to just those that were exactly four digits
long [0-9]. There are 10,000 possible combinations that the digits 0-9 can be
arranged into to form a four-digit code. Berry analyzed those to find which are
the least and most predictable. He speculates that, if users select a
four-digit password for an online account or other web site, it's not a stretch
to use the same number for their four-digit bank PIN codes.
What
he found, he says, was a "staggering lack of imagination" when it
comes to selecting passwords. Nearly 11% of the 3.4 million four-digit
passwords he analyzed were 1234. The second most popular PIN in is 1111 (6% of
passwords), followed by 0000 (2%). (Last year SplashData compiled a list of the
most common numerical and word-based passwords and found that
"password" and "123456" topped the list.)
Berry says a whopping 26.83% of all passwords
could be guessed by attempting just 20 combinations of four-digit numbers (see
first table). "It's amazing how predictable people are," he says.
We
don't like hard-to-remember numbers and "no one thinks their wallet will
get stolen," Berry says.
Days,
Months, Years
Many
of the commonly used passwords are, of course, dates: birthdays, anniversaries,
year of birth, etc. Indeed, using a year, starting with 19__, helps people
remember their code, but it also increases its predictability, Berry says. His
analysis shows that every single 19__ combination be found in the top 20% of
the dataset.
"People
use years, date of birth — it's a monumentally stupid thing to do because, if
you lose your wallet, your driver's license is in there. If someone finds it,
they've got the date of birth on there. At least use a parent's date of birth
[as a password]," says Berry.
Somewhat
intriguing was #22 on the most common password list: 2580. It seems random, but
if you look at a telephone keypad (or ATM keypad), you'll see those numbers are
straight down the middle — yet another sign that we're uncreative and lazy
password makers.
The
Least Predictable Password
The
least-used PIN is 8068, Berry found, with just 25 occurrences in the 3.4
million set, which equates to 0.000744%. (See the second table for the least
popular passwords.) Why this set of numbers? Berry guesses, "It's not a
repeating pattern, it's not a birthday, it's not the year Columbus discovered
America, it's not 1776." At a certain point, these numbers at the bottom
of the list are all kind of "the lowest of the low, they're all
noise," he says.
A
few other interesting tidbits from Berry:
-The
most popular PIN code (1234) is used more than the lowest 4,200 codes combined.
- People have even less imagination in
choosing five-digit passwords — 28% use 12345.
- The fourth most popular seven-digit password
is 8675309, inspired by the Tommy Tutone song.
-People love using couplets for their PINs:
4545, 1313, etc. And for some reason, they don't like using pairs of numbers
that have larger numerical gaps between them. Combinations like 45 and 67 occur
much more frequently than 29 and 37.
- The 17th most common 10-digit password is
3141592654 (for those of you who are not math nerds, those are the first digits
of Pi).
Story source: YAHOO! FINANCE: http://goo.gl/SJs0G
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Author: Kingsley the Analist
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