As anyone with more than one bank card will know, remembering a variety of PIN codes can be an impossible task.

It should perhaps comes as no surprise, therefore, that the most popular PIN in use has been found to be 1234.

While some of us devise crafty combinations of numbers based on our pet’s birthday or the date of our wedding anniversary, research suggests that many people simply opt for the most memorable code they can think of.

A study by the DataGenetics blog found the second most popular PIN was 1111, followed by 0000, 1212 and 7777.

The digits zero to nine can be arranged in 10,000 possible ways to form a four-digit PIN code.

But using data from security breaches and previously released or exposed password tables, the bloggers found that 11% of the 3.4 million passwords they looked at were 1234 – a proportion they described as “staggering” and betraying a "lack of imagination."

More than six per cent of the passwords were 1111.

Many people also used the year of their birth to create their PIN, with every single combination of the digits in the years 1901 to 1999 occurring in the top fifth of the data set.

The least common PIN code, meanwhile, was 8068, which occurred just 25 times in the study of 3.4 million codes.

The bloggers warned that anyone with one of the most popular PINs should “apply common sense and immediately change them to something a little less predictable.”

Their research follows a cybercrime report in June revealing that criminals can buy personal details online for less than £20.

Credit card details without PINs can be purchased for just £16, while a PIN costs £65. A credit card with PIN and a guaranteed good balance sells for £130, according to the security software company McAfee.