![[OC] A tribute to Nick Berry: Popularity heatmap of 6-digit PINs](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/3ynnfcqsz4gg1-1536x1375.png "[OC] A tribute to Nick Berry: Popularity heatmap of 6-digit PINs")
I hope this isn't posted here weekly, and my apologies if it is.
This is inspired by the legendary Nick Berry (RIP), who made a heatmap of all 4-digit PINs. I took his inspiration and did the same, based on HaveIBeenPwned's Pwned Passwords API, for 6-digit PINs.
Only about 200 PINs don't appear at all in the data set, but the rest shows the same clear patterns that Nick already saw in his original blog post. You can see that birthdays are very popular, you can also discern some specific geometric patterns, and of course 121212, 454545 etc. are very popular.
Hope you like it.
Posted by ChristopherKunz
3 Comments
* The data is based on Pwned Passwords API: [https://haveibeenpwned.com/api/v3#PwnedPasswords](https://haveibeenpwned.com/api/v3#PwnedPasswords)
* The heat map is generated by a simple enough Python script using matplotlib and numpy.
Do people just not start their pin with anything over 300-ish? Whats with the sudden drop along the y? Thats very interesting.
Also, I totally checked the pin I use to see if its common.
This won’t apply in the UK as a massive proportion use the 6 digit phone number from when they were a child 👀