Do not choose any PIN code to protect your phone or bank card! Some combinations like 1234 are very easy to guess, but others are likely to surprise you …
You necessarily use at least a PIN code (Personal Identification Number Or personal identification number in French), whether to unlock your smartphone, access your online banking services or withdraw money from the automatic counter, protecting your secrets and money. It most often has four figures, but it can sometimes go up to six. For example, a PIN code is requested when you turn on or restart your smartphone, to access the telephone services.
With four figures, there are 10,000 possible combinations. But today we are so overwhelmed with numbers and passwords that we must memorize that we can be tempted to reuse the same or use an easy to remember. Suddenly, they tend to be easy to crack …
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation looked at the issue, and analyzed a total of 29 million four -digit pine codes from the Have I Been Pwned platform? which lists passwords and pirated codes. It then created a graph revealing which figures sequences appear particularly frequently in the data set.
It turns out that the most popular pine codes are particularly easy to guess when phones and bank cards fall into bad hands. We thus find the unbeatable 1234, and its inverted variant, 4321. Some have tried to be clever by mixing the figures to make 1342. But it is the fourth most popular code! And let’s not talk about simplistic combinations like 1111 and 0000, which are also at the top of the ranking, or rehearsals of pairs like 1212, 2020 and 1313, also very popular.
But, beyond these obviousness, other combinations are also to be avoided. Indeed, many users use birthday dates, with PIN codes composed of figures ranging from 01 to 31 for the days and from 01 to 12 for the respective months, the order of these pairs varying according to the country of the country . And many use their year of birth: 1986 is the most popular year while 2004 is in the Top 20.
Also, it is better to avoid the frequently used figures sequences, as they are the first to be tested. With in general only five attempts there are 12.7 % chance that cybercriminals will find a PIN code. Also, as far as possible, choose a PIN code that does not correspond to anything or a longer combination of six numbers, when possible.