Is there such a thing as a strong PIN?

One would think that it could be easy to crack someone’s PIN. It’s only 4 digits, how hard can it be? If you are going to try, well good luck. Those four numbers give 10,000 different combinations for a PIN number. Is it the most secure thing in the world? No it isn’t but a four-digit PIN balances difficulty to crack and ease of remembering.

Are you secure here?

So how long would it take to brute-force crack the PIN? That is, you walk up to a keypad, start with 0000 and go to 9999 figuring that one of them is going to work (and assuming you don’t have one of those cool devices that you see in the movies and on TV). Assuming that you have no need for sleep, food, or water and that you don’t develop any sort of finger fatigue, you should be able to crack the code electronically in about 3 days.
Thieves don’t have that kind of time to devote to get into your bank account or electronic device, especially for an unknown payoff (believe me they wouldn’t be getting much if they got into my bank account). Unfortunately, we make it easy for the thieves to get our PIN number and they don’t even need to steal it. You (hopefully) put a strong password on your email and other electronic accounts. Did you know that there are strong PIN numbers? You should be able to guess what weak PIN numbers are; 1234,1111,2222,etc. There are others like 1379, 2580 (think of the keypad), or couplets like 1212. Those combinations alone make up half of the PIN numbers in use according to data compiled from recent data breaches. A strong PIN has no link to your biographical information, for example not using a birth year of yourself or any relative. It will have no couplets and no pattern to it. From the data breach information it was found that the combination 8068 was the least used PIN. We’re not saying change your PIN to that, but it will keep your account much safer than 1234.