ABC News has published a “popular” rating of the popularity of PIN codes chosen by users of smartphones and various web services. As it turned out, most of them do not attach much importance to the complexity of this digital “key”.
What you should know
The rating is based on statistics from the Have I Been Pwned service?, which specializes in monitoring leaks of confidential user data. The most popular PIN code is quite predictable: the combination 1234 was chosen by 9% of “respondents”, whose data was merged into the network.
The second most common PIN code was 1111 (1.6%), and the third was 0000 (1.1%). The fourth place in the ranking was taken by the combination 1342 – a variation of 1234 with the digits rearranged “for complexity”, and the fifth – 1212.
The top 40 also includes the code 2580. At first glance, it looks original, but in fact it is just a vertical line (from top to bottom) on the standard input panel on smartphones.
The authors of the publication noted that a similar trend is inherent not only to simple PIN codes, but also to passwords – the combination 123456 is still used by many people around the world.