The Most Common iPhone Passcodes 192
Orome1 writes "The problem of poor passwords is not confined to computer use, and that fact was illustrated by an app developer who has added code to capture user passcodes to one of its applications. 'Because Big Brother's [the app in question] passcode setup screen and lock screen are nearly identical to those of the actual iPhone passcode lock, I figured that the collected information would closely correlate with actual iPhone passcodes,' says Daniel Amitay. It turns out that of the 204,508 recorded passcodes, 15% were one of the most common ten."
Here's a question... (Score:4, Interesting)
...how did an app like "Big Brother" make it onto the App(le) store?
I thought they paid people to test each app before approval; you know, as a first defense against apps that look to imitate the lock screen and steal passcodes...
1998, lol (Score:4, Interesting)
So, the most common age of the user is 13?
Or the most common age of their offspring?
-AI
Re:Nitpick (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, my preference would be for the thief to keep using the phone, and hopefully Find My iPhone would enable me to actually recover the phone.
I have mixed thoughts about that. If more people reported their phone stolen immediately, to have the IMEI blocked by all the cell networks, it could be somewhat a deterrant against theft too. If you want to add a pascode remotely, better remove sensitive data too.
The Find My iPhone function may indeed be used by some people in those situations.
There is also a problem, that if you don't have it deactivated immediately, and the thief racks up a few thousand in usage charges, e.g. international calls (your phone used by the thief to fraudulently re-sell toll calls) or overseas data roaming, you could be on the hook for some serious $$ in some cases.
The lost iPhone may be $600 to replace, but at least you can be confident there is such a strict limit to your losses, if you do brick/deactivate the phone's service before the perp can abuse the phone's access to your account.
It should be noted the passcode protection is only good against unsophisticated thieves. There are ways to bypass the passcode and then remove it/view it, or gain access to all data on an iPhone, without requiring any silliness of attempts, or trying to guess the passcode.
That is there are some people who can gain access to 100% of fully working iPhones, with physical access and sufficient motive, common passcode or not.
For this reason.... I don't think there's anything irrational about the decision to use a weak/easy passcode.
Until Apple actually encrypts all data on the phone with the authenticator, that is, and use biometrics, such as face recognition, rather than manual entry of digits.