Devon TRF Group Forum

What are the most common passwords in use?

1) password
2) 123456
3) 12345678
4) qwerty
5) abc123
6) monkey
7) 0123456
8) letmein
9) trustno1
10) dragon

Therefore, if you use any of the above for your password for anything, consider how long it would take a hacker to break into your account with only this information.

What about PIN numbers for e.g. credit cards etc?

1) 1234 - 10.7% of people
2) 1111 - 6%
3) 0000 - 2%
4) 1212 - 1.2%
5) 7777 - 0.75%
5) 7777 0.745%
6) 1004 0.616%
7) 2000 0.613%
8) 4444 0.526%
9) 2222 0.516%
10) 6969 0.512%
11) 9999 0.451%
12) 3333 0.419%
13) 5555 0.395%
14) 6666 0.391%
15) 1122 0.366%
16) 1313 0.304%
17) 8888 0.303%
18) 4321 0.293%
19) 2001 0.290%
20) 1010 0.285%

In fact, according to http://www.datagenetics.com/, nearly 27% of cards are protected by only 20 PIN numbers. If you use any of the above, it is easy to see that it would take no time at all for your account to be violated. The same applies to any other 'easy' PIN number. Based on this, if somebody were to gain access to 100 credit/debit card numbers (pretty easy to do), they would be able to use an average 27 of these cards within seconds.

Therefore, take action to protect yourself from this, by changing your passwords/PIN numbers to something less obvious. Ideally, use a combination of letters (upper & lower case), numbers and punctuation, as long as possible.

In addition, if you use the same password for e.g. Ebay, Paypal, Amazon and your bank accounts, it will only take one breach to open up all this to a hacker. Try to use different passwords on all accounts, and different PIN numbers on your cards too. If you really must write them down, try to confuse a potential thief by adding extra digits before/after, or making them look like a phone number, adding a value to each digit, or some other method of disguising them.