09-19-2012, 02:19 AM
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PIN analysis
PIN analysis
Quote:
Over the years, there have been numerous password table security breaches: Some very high profile, some low profile, but all embarrassing (and many exceedingly expensive; both in direct fines and indirect loss of business through erosion of trust and reputation).
Fool me once, well, no, even that’s not really acceptable, but fool me twice … I’ll go even further: Any developer who stores the password table of their database in clear text should be so mortified by this lack of security that they should not be sleeping at night until they fix it. Ignoring the fact that you should never have ever coded it this way, you have an obligation to learn from these past breaches.
If you work for a company and are knowledgeable that your customer database is “protected” by such lightweight security then run, don’t walk, to your CEO/Presidents office, pound on the door and insist (s)he puts out a mandate to fix the matter with extreme prejudice. Don’t leave until you get an affirmative response. Badger, badger then badger them again. Make yourself a proverbial thorn in their side.
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Quote:
The most popular password is 1234 …
… it’s staggering how popular this password appears to be. Utterly staggering at the lack of imagination …
… nearly 11% of the 3.4 million passwords are 1234 !!!
The next most popular 4-digit PIN in use is 1111 with over 6% of passwords being this.
In third place is 0000 with almost 2%.
A table of the top 20 found passwords in shown. A staggering 26.83% of all passwords could be guessed by attempting these 20 combinations!
(Statistically, with 10,000 possible combination, if passwords were uniformly randomly distributed, we would expect the these twenty passwords to account for just 0.2% of the total, not the 26.83% encountered)
Looking more closely at the top few records, all the usual suspects are present 1111 2222 3333…9999 as well as 1212 and (snigger) 6969.
It’s not a surprise to see patterns like 1122 and 1313 occurring high up in the list, nor 4321 or 1010 .
2001 makes an appearance at #19. 1984 follows not far behind in position #26, and James Bond fans may be interested to know 0007 is found between the two of them in position #23 (another variant 0070 follows not much further behind at #28).
The first “puzzling” password I encountered was 2580 in position #22. What is the significance of these digits? Why should so many people select this code to make it appear so high up the list?
Then I realized that 2580 is a straight down the middle of a telephone keypad!
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This data comes strictly from a numerical perspective, but I have a feeling a lot of people use their own name or the name of their child for a PIN from a telephone pad (Where a name like "Mary" would be "6279")...
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"You get the respect that you give" - cnredd
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I have actually gotten 1234 and "password" to work. 
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