Most Common iPhone Passcodes

Everyone knows it is a good idea to lock your phone in case it is lost or stolen.  But is that passcode you picked really secure?  The iPhone allows you to pick a four digit code which means there are 10,000 different combinations.  If you set your device to wipe the memory after 10 wrong attempts that means you will only have a 0.1% chance of success.  Sounds pretty good till you think that there 10 codes that 15% of iPhones are used.  With a 15% rate about 1 in 7 iPhones could be unlocked easily.

There was an app called Big Brother Camera Security (Free application that was in the top 25 free apps) that was a security application that would take a picture of someone using your iphone 4 using the front camera. Daniel Amitay the author of the application added some code to record Big Brother’s Passcode entry and send it back to him completely anonymous.  (Boy a spy security program spying on you!)  He collected 204,508 passcodes before Apple removed the app from the store.  He noted several interesting things in the numbers.  The top number was chosen by 4.3% of users and the top 4 was 10.8% of users.  So a person would have a pretty good odds on getting on the phone.

The top 10 pass codes were (listed in rank order) 1234, 0000, 2580, 1111, 5555, 5683, 0852, 2222, 1212, 1998.  Most of the top passcodes follow typical formulas, such as four identical digits, moving in a line up/down the pad, repetition. 5683 is the passcode with the least obvious pattern, but it turns out that it is the number representation of LOVE (5683).  What also was found that 1990-2000 all were in the top 50 and 1980-1989 are all in the top 100.  This could be passcodes of birth years, graduation years, or anniversary years.  With a bit more guessing if the person know you they may have a better chance of unlocking it.

If you are using any of these codes you should change it right way with a totally random number.  But remember that this code also may be used for your bank atm card, alarm system, keyless entry to your car and many other sites so they all need to be changed.  What this shows is that our days of secure information is limited and we need to search for other ways to secure our data and lives.

For more infromation and graphs about the most common iPhone passcodes, check out this article http://amitay.us/blog/files/most_common_iphone_passcodes.php