With three boys, I’m always picking up their cell phones to snoop on them. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about, or you don’t do the same thing. You know, who they’re texting and calling. Sherlock Holmes stuff like that. We’ll argue the privacy issues another time.
Trouble is, their iPhones have passwords, also known as passcodes, on them. So after a few frantic guesses to break the secret four digit code, I usually give up. But a new study found many people are making some bad password choices.
The study shows that iPhone users tend to use passcodes that are pretty easy to break. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out many of the passcodes. Here are the top ten passcodes, representing 15% of all passcodes in use:
- 1234, 0000 and 1111. Not very imaginative. And yes, I’ve tried those numbers
on my boys’ phones. Thankfully, they’re smarter than that. - 5683 is also in that top ten list. Not so obvious, right? But it turns out, that spells out LOVE. One of my boys has a girlfriend. I’ll try that number tonight.
- 2580 and 0852. They run straight down and up the phone keypad.
- People also tend to use years that mean something to them, like their birth year or when they graduated from high school. 1998 is on the top ten list, which means, according to one comment I read, there are way too many 12 and 13 year olds with iPhones.
I say those who use any of these passcodes are just plain 3862 (or “dumb”, if you need me to spell it out). I’ll try that one too next time I get a hold of one of my sons’ iPhones.
