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                           Is Your PIN Easy to Guess?

   Adam Engst

   At ABC News (from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), [1]Julian
   Fell and Teresa Tan collaborated on an engaging piece that illustrates
   the popularity of certain four-digit PINs.

     Whether it's to unlock your smartphone, access your online banking
     or get cash out of the ATM, a four-digit PIN is often there to keep
     your secrets and your money safe.

     It's an important little code, but not all choices are equally
     secure.

     That's why we analysed 29 million of them from Have I Been Pwned? '
     an Australian-run site that helps people all over the world find out
     if they've been affected by data breaches.

     The most commonly used PINs turned out to be staggeringly popular,
     meaning they're particularly easy to guess when phones and bank
     cards fall into the wrong hands.

   As you scroll through the article, the authors explain particular
   PINs'and approaches for generating them'on a heatmap with brighter
   squares representing more heavily used PINs. They call out sequential
   numbers, repeated numbers, birth years, numbers that could represent
   dates, and more. The article ends with a list of the top 50 PINs to
   avoid. An astonishing 9% of people use 1234, followed by 1111 and 0000,
   at 1.6% and 1.1%. The next time you find yourself in a high-stakes
   movie plot and need to break into the villain's phone, try those three.

   [2]Read original article

References

   1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-28/almost-one-in-ten-people-use-the-same-four-digit-pin/103946842
   2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-28/almost-one-in-ten-people-use-the-same-four-digit-pin/103946842

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