The 20 card PINs that you should never use

If “123456” has been the most common password in 2022 in Spain, it should not surprise us that we are not particularly cautious with our credit or debit card either and opt for the ease of remembering the PIN instead of putting a really secure one.

Taking into account that our payment card can be stolen or cloned, if on top of that they find one of the 20 most insecure PIN numbers , the result can be a large embezzlement in your checking account. If you have any of these, change it as soon as possible, because you run a great risk.

The 20 card PINs that you should never use

20 PIN numbers to avoid

According to an analysis by DataGenetics , we are not especially cautious about the PIN we put on our card. Despite containing only four numbers, 10,000 possible combinations of card protection codes from 0000 to 9999 can be produced, and almost 3.4 million four-digit passwords were analyzed for this study.

However, the most popular banking PIN in the world is by now 1234 . Beyond this combination of the first four numbers in consecutive order, we also find PIN numbers made up of the same number in the four positions, such as 1111, 0000 or 7777 among the 5 most used.

Position PIN Frequency
#1 1234 10.713%
#two 1111 6.016%
#3 0000 1.881%
#4 1212 1.197%
#5 7777 0.745%
#6 1004 0.616%
#7 2000 0.613%
#8 4444 0.526%
#9 2222 0.516%
#10 6969 0.512%
#eleven 9999 0.451%
#12 3333 0.419%
#13 5555 0.395%
#14 6666 0.391%
#fifteen 1122 0.366%
#16 1313 0.304%
#17 8888 0.303%
#18 4321 0.293%
#19 2001 0.290%
#twenty 1010 0.285%

Bearing this information in mind, if at any time our card ends up in the hands of others, either by theft or cloning, having one of these 20 PIN numbers would make it really easy for criminals to be able to access the key and carry out movements with the card. Just trying the top 20 passwords can guess a staggering 26.83% of all passwords when trying these 20 combinations .

The most used passwords are insecure

Putting codes that are really easy to crack is not unique to numeric PIN codes, but is a common security problem on the Internet even when alphanumeric characters are allowed.

NordPass has recently published its annual research revealing the 200 most common passwords in Spain and it also shows that people tend to opt for convenience , with easy-to-use combinations of numbers, letters and symbols on the keyboard leading the way. most lists worldwide. «123456» is still the most common password in many countries, not only in Spain, but also in Colombia, France and Japan. Worldwide, the most widely used password is… “password”.

In order of use, these are the 20 most used passwords in Spain , and therefore the most insecure:

  1. 123456
  2. 123456789
  3. swing
  4. 12345
  5. 12345678
  6. 1234
  7. 1234567890
  8. 000000
  9. password
  10. 1234567
  11. 111111
  12. hello
  13. Barcelona
  14. QWERTY
  15. I love you
  16. 123123
  17. Andrea
  18. 666666
  19. 12345678910
  20. Alexander

Despite continuous warnings from cybersecurity experts about the consequences of irresponsible password management , Internet users made the same mistake again. Compared to 2021 data, 73% of the 200 most common passwords in 2022 remain the same. Additionally, 83% of the passwords on this year’s list can be cracked in less than a second.