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3.4M PIN numbers that were pulled together from a whole bunch of data breaches have been heat mapped, and they are quite interesting (to me at least): https://www.grc.com/miscfiles/pin.png[^]
Given that most (if not all ATM / shop card readers work with 4 digit PINs, it's interesting to see what people generally use. Notice the lines and clusters: identical pairs (0000, 0101, ...) birthdate day and month, birth year seem to be pretty common, but it's interesting to note two things:
1) There are a small number of "empty" or "near empty" cells where people just aren't disposed to use that combination.
2) 20 out of the possible 10,000 different PIN values are used by 27% of the population ... so if you want to "brute force" a PIN, those are the ones to try first - if you are using one of them, it's probably time to change it:
1234, 4321, 0000, 7777, 2000, 2222, 9999, 5555, 1122, 8888, 2001, 1111, 1212, 1004, 4444, 6969, 3333, 6666, 1313, 1010
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Very interesting picture. Any four consecutive digits appear to be highly used.
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Yeah - it's surprising how much human beings can skew what you might assume was pretty random data!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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We're all a bunch of skew be do's.
These numbers are interesting (7410, 7942, 8520) since they don't seem to follow any pattern.
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No pattern? 7410 goes down one side of a standard keypad, while 8520 goes down the middle.
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Totally missed that. Thanks!
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I was looking at physical distances between keys and I see that in most cases where each value is far from the next value they tend to be "more rare".
Or, stated another way, "if your finger is already there, you probably pick something closeby".
If you typed a 2 you probably type a 1 or 3 or maybe 5 next. The physical layout of the keypad does a lot to "force" certain combinations, I think.
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That's what I get for responding to a stale screen and not updating before I post. Wasn't trying to steal thunder or anything.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
I’m begging you for the benefit of everyone, don’t be STUPID.
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7410 is down the left hand side of the number keys pad of a full size keyboard. 8520 is the middle, it gets zero too since the zero key is usually a double width key.
No idea about the 7942 though.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
I’m begging you for the benefit of everyone, don’t be STUPID.
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The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was first published in 1979, and as you probably know, brings the number 42 to prominence.
( @Bassam-Abdul-Baki this is sort of in reply to you, too, though yours didn't explicitly call out 7942 )
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That's a very high number of THGTTG fans then. Now I have to check if 0504 is as high or higher.
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True. I was wondering about other effects that might add to the H2G2 effect on this particular number to make it jump out, and it occurred to me that people born in 1979 might be 42 years old at the time of making their PIN around 2021? It would be an interesting bit of statistical analysis involving guesses, educated or otherwise, on the PIN creation dates to try to tease such an effect out of the data and prove if it is significantly above chance or not.
(p.s. Is your 0504 speculation about the movie release date?)
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No. 0504 is May the Fourth for Star Wars fans. I assume there's a larger group of SW fans than THGTTG fans.
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Ah, yes of course. I know “May the fourth be with you” well, but being Australian I didn’t think to write it that way around, despite it being the Jedi way around of saying it.
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Banks (in India, most probably elsewhere too) block the login after three incorrect PIN entries (to unlock which the customer has to complete some formalities after visiting a bank branch). So, the customer has at least some protection.
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In Switzerland and surely other western European countries (France for sure), PINs are 6 digits, also with a three-try limit, after which the card is swallowed (in an ATM) and simply blocked until the bank issues another PIN or even a new card.
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I have yet to understand how PIN numbers are more secure than passwords. Face it, there are only 10,000 combinations, yet even an alphabetic, case insensitive, PIN would have 456,976 combinations. I would expect being able to brute force a pin number, regardless of length, would be easy for modern computers that can break 128-bit key based encryption systems in hours.
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They are not necessarily safer, just a lot more convenient.
I think the banking industry (where PIN are used a lot ) weighted the pros and cons of 4 or 5 digits PIN and decided that there is a risk, but it's manageable.
Also, I can't imagine having an ATM with a full keyboard and my dad trying to enter his password.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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Your pasword must contain ...[^]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Sanskrit, Cyrillic, Latin, Chinese, and Arabic characters should be enough for everyone!
FYI, you'd be amazed at how hard it is for most applications/websites/passwords to deal with 2 different sets of alphabets.
Bond
Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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obermd wrote: I have yet to understand how PIN numbers are more secure than passwords.
It is most likely a numeric pin and not a password because manufacturing and maintaining a numeric keypad ATM machine is far more economical than producing one with a full fledged QWERTY keyboard. It almost always comes down to the costs.
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obermd wrote:
I have yet to understand how PIN numbers are more secure than passwords. Face it, there are only 10,000 combinations, yet even an alphabetic, case insensitive, PIN would have 456,976 combinations. I would expect being able to brute force a pin number, regardless of length, would be easy for modern computers that can break 128-bit key based encryption systems in hours.
I wondered that too for a long while. If you dig into the various places where PINs are used, you will find that anywhere a PIN is used, there is strong protection behind it to back it up.
PINs generally have very strong limitations on how many times you can get them wrong (i.e. 3 times) -- because failure lockout reset can be controlled externally by more secure methods (2FA, MFA, big brother style behavior pattern matching, etc.)
Offline attacks toward a PIN tend not to work because the PIN is not the primary secret. So the use limitation of the PIN protects the use of the much stronger public/private key encryption which protects the actual data you wish to protect.
Credit/debit cards have those cryptography chips now -- those hold the public/private key encryption, locked into read-only memory in nanometer scale size, and the PIN protects the use of that strong encryption, any funny business using it -- and that strong encryption becomes invalid -- it's new card time.
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OriginalGriff wrote: 1234
"That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage." 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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"I've lost the bleeps. I've lost the creeps. And I've lost the sweeps."
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"How many assholes have we got on this ship anyway?"
YO!
Software Zen: delete this;
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