If you lost your ATM card on the street, how easy would it be for someone to correctly guess your PIN and proceed to clean out your savings account? Quite easy, according to data scientist Nick Berry, founder of Data Genetics, a Seattle technology consultancy. Berry analyzed passwords from previously released and exposed tables and security breaches, filtering the results to just those that were exactly four digits long 0-9. There are 10,000 possible combinations that the digits 0-9 can be arranged into to form a four-digit code.
Berry analyzed those to find which are the least and most predictable. He speculates that, if users select a four-digit password for an online account or other web site, it's not a stretch to use the same number for their four-digit bank PIN codes. What he found, he says, was a 'staggering lack of imagination' when it comes to selecting passwords. Nearly 11% of the 3.4 million four-digit passwords he analyzed were 1234. The second most popular PIN in is 1111 (6% of passwords), followed by 0000 (2%). (Last year SplashData compiled a list of the most common numerical and word-based passwords and found that 'password' and '123456' topped the list.) Berry says a whopping 26.83% of all passwords could be guessed by attempting just 20 combinations of four-digit numbers (see first table). 'It's amazing how predictable people are,' he says.
We don't like hard-to-remember numbers and 'no one thinks their wallet will get stolen,' Berry says. Many of the commonly used passwords are, of course, dates: birthdays, anniversaries, year of birth, etc.
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Indeed, using a year, starting with 19, helps people remember their code, but it also increases its predictability, Berry says. His analysis shows that every single 19 combination be found in the top 20% of the dataset. Berry says a whopping 26.83% of all passwords could be guessed by attempting just 20 combinations of four-digit numbers (see first table). 'It's amazing how predictable people are,' he says.
This guy obviously doesn't have a clue how smart cards (bank cards) work then, they're pretty similiar to SIM cards in that you have 3 attempts to input the correct pin, the bank machine transmits the PIN to the card, if it is wrong, it is not the bank machine that logs it but the smart card, after 3 wrong attempts, the smart card refuses to accept any more pin numbers and locks itself out (there is no PUK code for bank cards as there are SIM cards) and so the machine keeps it. Older cards would just refuse to accept any more PIN attempts but keep all the data in the smart card, newer cards destroy all data on the card when 3 attempts have been failed, because you can in theory reset the count or read off the data using a very powerful microscope though you'd have to know exactly where to look. Besides the 3 times limit, what about the security camera taking your picture? Unfortunately: myth! I had my card cloned.
Long story with people saying it can't be done, it's never done - oh look it's been done. Basically my bank trying to find any reason to pin the 4.?50 withdrawals on me (4 spots around London, on a day I could prove I was in Leicester). I got the police involved (even though my bank tried to convince me otherwise and take the?200 hit myself).
I knew nobody would be caught/arrested but point of calling police involvement was to call the banks bluff. Anyway, police told me that there are no cameras in the majority of ATMs. Unfortunately: myth!
I had my card cloned. Long story with people saying it can't be done, it's never done - oh look it's been done. Basically my bank trying to find any reason to pin the 4.?50 withdrawals on me (4 spots around London, on a day I could prove I was in Leicester). I got the police involved (even though my bank tried to convince me otherwise and take the?200 hit myself). I knew nobody would be caught/arrested but point of calling police involvement was to call the banks bluff. Anyway, police told me that there are no cameras in the majority of ATMs. I had a similar issue with Lloyds TSB - had my card 'cloned' and spent in France.
Bank told me outright that they were not responsible, and I must have given my PIN to someone. I complained to the FSA, who found that Lloyds had authorised the transactions on my cloned card without chip and pin (when they got the signature from the retailer, it was actually an exact copy of mine from the card, but I could prove I wasn't in France at that time), and made Lloyds pay out the?150, plus?140 odd in compensation for my time. In my opinion, the fact that it's been proven many times that the PIN can be bypassed easily is more worrying than people using common PIN codes. All the new ATM's around me you still have to put your card into it and it takes it until you are done. And these are brand new systems All of the Bank of America ATM's here were recently changed to where you put the card in and it spits it back out right away, then you enter your pin. I think it is to stop people from forgetting to 1: Press 'Done' and 2: Leaving their cards behind.
And if the person drives away now before pressing done, and they request any other transaction they have to re-put their pin number back in.