One way to make things easy for identity thieves is to choose an unimaginative, easy-to-remember PIN that tons of other people are using.
An iPhone app developer identified the 10 most frequently used iPhone passcodes, finding that the top 10 made up 15 percent of more than 204,000 passcodes he anonymously recorded from his app’s lockscreen.
The codes included 1234, 0000, 2580, 1111, 5555, 5683, 0852, 2222, 1212 and 1998. The developer also found that years between 1930 and 2020 had a much higher frequency than any other number combination, meaning people commonly use years that mean something to them.
In vague terms, how do you go about choosing a difficult-to-guess password?