History Main / ThePassWordIsAlwaysSwordfish

* In ''WesternAnimation/SpongebobSquarepants'' Mr. Krabs has a voice activated password for a door that will only open, when he says open.

* Averted and subverted in ''Sewer, Gas And Electric'', when the heroine hears a supercomputer's complex administrative-level password on a video clip. When she tries to use it herself, it fails to work, as the video clip was prepared [[spoiler: by the supercomputer itself]], giving her false information.

* In the ''Series/Warehouse13'' episode "13.1", the password Hugo Miller uses to secure his groundbreaking [[AIIsACrapshoot AI]] is his cat's name. The length of time the password has been in the system accidentally makes this more secure, as everyone but Hugo has forgotten what the cat's name was. Fortunately for the agents, Hugo's accident left him [[TalkativeLoon very talkative]].

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* There was TheThreeStooges short ''Studio Stoops'' where Moe and Larry are trying to think of a password. Larry suggests "Open the door!" Moe smiles and compliments him on his idea, then promptly hits him in the face.

* In an episode of ''Series/{{Scrubs}}'' Ted asks JD not to watch him type his password... then says it aloud as he's typing it (it's "alligator3").

* ''Film/BatmanAndRobin'': Alfred protects a CD (containing Comicbook/{{Batman}} and Robin's secret identities, the location of the Batcave, and other such trivial little stuff) with the password "Peg", which is too short, both a dictionary word and a relative's name, and written on an autographed photo right on his desk. This enables another character to easily access the disk. Admittedly, the disk was intended to be accessed by Alfred's brother (as designated heir to Alfred's position), and [[spoiler: it's hinted that Alfred expected Barbara to [[ReversePsychology disobey his request]] to leave the disk alone]] but ''really''...

* Siemens advises its customers never to change the default password of their WinCC SCADA system. They continue to do so now that the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet stuxnet worm]] has successfully destroyed industrial hardware in uranium enrichment facilities.

*** He reveals that the only reason [=McCay=] even entered it in his presense is because he didn't think "your typical grunt" woukd remember it. Unfortunately for Rodney, Sheppard has Mensa-level IQ.

* In the ''DuckTales'' movie ''The Treasure of the Lost Lamp'', Huey, Dewey, and Louie put their awesome codebreaking skills to work opening the side entrance of Scrooge's Moneybin.
--> '''Huey''': "C...A...S...H!" ''door opens''

* In ''TheNinthGate'', the combination of the door to the private library of an occult scholar obsessed with Satanism is also [[NumberOfTheBeast 666]]. He must have thought he was very clever.

* In the BigFinishDoctorWho audio drama ''[[Recap/BigFinishDoctorWhoNEDAS4E5Deimos Deimos]]'', the Doctor's companion Tamsin accesses the power distribution centre of a Martian moonbase with the password "PASSWORD".

* In-universe example: in ''StillLife2'' the killer's passwords for the first half of the game are all easily personal information easily researched by others. [[spoiler:Turns out, those are the ones [[ThePlan you were supposed to figure out]].]]

* "Schwertfisch" in the ''VideoGame/QuestForGloryI' VGA remake.

* In ''[[WinnieThePooh My Friends Tigger & Pooh: Tigger & Pooh and a Musical Too]]'', Tigger failed to guess Rabbit's password which would have allowed him to cross a line dividing the Hundred Acre Wood. Beaver then correctly guessed Tigger's password, which was "Tigger."

*** He reveals that the only reason [=McCay=] even entered it in his presense is because he didn't think "your typical grunt" won't remember it. Unfortunatly for Rodney, Sheppard has Mensa-level IQ.

** Episode 'Defiant', where the means of getting entry onto the ship uses not passwords but both a voiceprint AND fingerprint scan (possibly also a DNA check too as Odo mentions later that Will and Thomas Riker's DNA coding is identical). All of this done in front of a security guard too.

* Lampshaded and averted to the extreme in ''Von Neumann's War'' wherein a character notes that most people are uncreative with their passwords, using birthdays, names, etc. His own password? 189 digits of random high ASCII.

* Babylon5:

* In ''{{Smallville}}'', LexLuthor's computer password was at one point his dead little brother's name, Julian.

* HarryHarrison's short story ''[[Literature/{{Deathworld}} The Mothballed Spaceship]]'' has an old Imperial battleship, which the heroes need to reactivate in order to stop an attack on Earth. Unfortunately, nobody knows the deactivation code, although Jason tells Meta that it's probably something simple and straightforward (Harrison had a notoriously low opinion of the military). They try a difficult plan to get aboard the ship past its automated cannons. After that, they manage to get to the control room, only for the ship to start a self-destruct sequence. In the end, Meta saves the day by figuring out the password at the last moment. It's [[spoiler:"haltu" ([[EsperantoTheUniversalLanguage Esperanto]] for "stop")]].

* This is initially {{subverted|Trope}} in chapter 14 of ''[[FanFic/SonicGenerationsFriendshipIsTimeless Sonic Generations: Friendship is Timeless]]'' when accessing Eggman's system, which requires a password. Tails suggests "EGGMAN", which doesn't work. This is then DoubleSubverted with the password actually being "PASSWORD".

* ''AngeloRules'': one episode Angelo needs to break into a teachers computer. When he sees a picture of the teachers dog on his desk, he correctly assumes that the dogs name is the password, and [[BreakingTheFourthWall even directly tells the audience]] that about 80% of the people uses the name of their pet as a password.

* In the ''VisualNovel/{{Higurashi|NoNakuKoroNi}}'' fanfic [[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4923817/1/Redemption Redemption]], the password to some information so important that its original finder died for it is... "Umi" (Japanese for "ocean"). Taking this to real IdiotPlot levels, the team attempting to crack the password are stuck for ''months'' because they only guess English words. And they ''know'' the password is three letters, but no-one points out that [[WritersCannotDoMath 26^3 possibilities could be brute-forced by hand in less than a day]].

* In the Catwoman/Batman fanfic series ''[[http://catwoman-cattales.com Cat-Tales]]'' the password into Bruce's extra-secret partition of the Batcave mainframe is his father's first name, his mother's first name, and "justice." Noted here because once you sit down at the keyboard of a terminal hidden in the cave under the man's Stately Manor....

* In ''[[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5103188/1/The-Grinning-Snake The Grinning Snake]], Konoka, trying to enter a password-protected file on her father's computer to find out more about why he was killed, tries every obvious possibility first, including birthdays, pet names and favorite foods, then finally tries her own name and gets in.