A recent Pocket-lint blog post reported about the 20 most common mobile phone passcodes (AKA “PINs”) used by mobile phone users revealed in 2019 by a cybersecurity expert. This blog post also lists the most common four-digit and six-digit PINs as determined in 2020 by a German-American team of IT security researchers.
Users of one of these insecure PINs are encourged to read the “How to change your mobile phone PIN” section of the Pocket-lint blog post to learn how to change their PIN.
Tarah Wheeler and SANS institute findings
According to Tarah Wheeler—an American technology and cybersecurity author, public speaker, entrepreneur and executive1—26 per cent of all phones may be cracked with these 20 four-digit passcodes:
- 1234
- 1111
- 0000
- 1212
- 7777
- 1004
- 2000
- 4444
- 2222
- 6969
- 9999
- 3333
- 5555
- 6666
- 1122
- 1313
- 8888
- 4321
- 2001
- 1010
ℹ️ list source: original tweet by Tarah (at archive.org)
IT security researchers’ findings
Philipp Markert, Daniel Bailey, and Professor Markus Durmuth from the Horst Gortz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum conducted a study jointly with Dr. Maximilian Golla from the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum and Professor Adam Aviv from the George Washington University. They found the 10-most popular four-digit pins as well as the 10-most popular six-digit pins.2
Their results were presented at an IEEE Symposium on Privacy and Security.
Common four-digit PINs
- 1234
- 0000
- 2580
- 1111
- 5555
- 5683
- 0852
- 2222
- 1212
- 1998
Common six-digit PINs
- 123456
- 654321
- 111111
- 000000
- 123123
- 666666
- 121212
- 112233
- 789456
- 159753
ℹ️ list source: Pocket-lint blog post
“Tarah Wheeler”, Wikipedia, accessed May 16 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarah_Wheeler.) ↩︎
“These are the 20 most common phone PINs: Is your device vulnerable?”, Pocket-lint, accessed May 16 2023, https://www.pocket-lint.com/these-are-the-20-most-common-phone-pins-is-your-device-vulnerable/. ↩︎
