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Swordfish / Literature

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Examples of The Password Is Always "Swordfish" in literature.

"Swordfish" examples

Other bad password choices

  • In The Alice Network, René Boredelon always chooses false names from Baudelaire.
    Charlie: What makes you certain du Malassis is your Bordelon?
    Eve: Malassis is the surname of the publisher who printed Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal.
  • In Along Came a Spider, the villain mentions the significance of the phrase "Aces & Eights" to her, when she's using it as her password.
  • In the Michael Connelly novel Angels Flight, the password to a dead lawyer's computer is "VSLAPD". The lawyer had a particular habit of civil rights lawsuits against the LAPD, which would be titled "Elias vs. LAPD". The password was written down on a secretary's notepad.
  • Animorphs #27:
    Jake: [tone sardonic] Mr. King gave us an access code that'll get us into the main computer. Everybody memorize it: Six.
    Rachel: Six?
    Jake: Six.
    Rachel: [sighs] You know, I'm sure the Pemalites were wonderful people and all, but using a single-digit security code? I mean, good grief. What a bunch of idiots.
    Cassie: They trusted.
    Rachel: They're dead.
  • In Artemis Fowl:
    • The Opal Deception: Artemis correctly deduces that the henchmen didn't change the password on the cuffs on him and Holly Short from its factory default. However, it's not one digit repeated three times. It's the LEP equivalent to 911, which is on every billboard in Haven and Holly has memorized. This was possibly done deliberately so Opal could have more fun watching them try to survive against impossible odds.
    • Also in The Opal Deception, when Artemis' password for an encrypted disc is the family motto, Aurum potestas est. However, here he wanted Butler to guess the password.
    • In The Time Paradox, Foaly the centaur (who is one of the few people Artemis feels is on the same intellectual level as himself) asks Artemis the password to get into the manor's system. The password is CENTAUR, all caps.
  • Bad Mermaids: The top secret passcode to enter the mermaid-only Hidden Lagoon, which no human has been able to guess in thousands of years, is 'Ihavenolegs'.
  • Frequently comes up in Bastard Operator from Hell, where a character might mention their password as being something stupidly easy or complain that their old password is no longer valid. One story had a boss complain that his password of "X" doesn't work any more.
  • In Cherry Ames: Cruise Nurse by Helen Wells, the cruise ship's safe's combination is always the date it's set to sail.
  • Played with in a novel by C. J. Cherryh, the protagonist is mildly tortured for access to his laptop. Once he tells them the 'password' (giving the date where it asks for 'date') they access information deliberately designed for such an eventuality which looks good, but is useless.
  • Dark Future: Averted in Comeback Tour; Needlepoint requires a massive list of codewords to be entered in response to the satellite computer's queries, taking twelve hours to complete the correct entry of all the passwords. Parodied in Demon Download: The password is "swordfist" and is frequently mistaken for swordfish.
  • Harry Harrison's Deathworld short story "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 "haltu" (Esperanto for "stop").
  • The password to Senator Sedgewick Sexton's computer is only a little complex in Dan Brown's book Deception Point; His initials are SSS (which he actually used as his previous password only to change it after he lost an expensive dinner to his assistant as a result of her betting she could guess it in 10 seconds), and constantly talks about wanting to be the POTUS (President of the United States). Put them both together and you get POTUSSS (which said assistant also manages to guess).
  • In Dan Brown's Digital Fortress:
    • The password that stops the deadly virus from destroying US intelligence firewalls and opening their secrets to the public is 3, the number. That's it. The villain even leaves a clue to the password in the coding for the virus program for no clearly defined reason: "What is the prime difference between the elements responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki?" A team of NASA scientists have to go through a whole scene of incorrect guesswork of the clue to make it seem more clever.
    • Susan Fletcher agonizes over a five letter password, after being told that the person who set it had been clingingly obsessing over her since their first meeting. Despite being a cryptanalyst, and it being her own name.
  • Discworld:
    • Whether intentionally or not, the title of this page is a practically verbatim quote from Pratchett's Discworld novel Night Watch Discworld, in which Sam Vimes accidentally discovers the hidden password for a meeting of rebels and remarks on their lack of imagination.
    • In the Discworld novel Guards! Guards!, the doorkeeper for a secret society trades complicated pass-phrases with a new arrival, only to discover the newcomer is looking for a different secret gathering when the sixth phrase fails to match. (Apparently there are a LOT of secret societies in Ankh-Morpork.)
    • Subverted by an enchanted door in Mort, which harangues a character with a demand for "the magic word" before it will open... Only it's not asking for a password—as your mother told you, the magic word is "please". Subverted further in that she doesn't catch on; the door only tells her the answer after its owner hears her fighting with it and lets her in himself.
      Door: You could try using The Magic Word. Coming from an attractive woman it works nine times out of eight.
      Keli: And what is the magic word?
      Door: Have you been taught nothing, miss?
      Keli: I have been educated by some of the finest scholars on the disc!
      Door: Well if they didn't teach you the magic word they couldn't have been all that fine.
  • Doctor Who Expanded Universe: Lampshaded in The Last Dodo. The Doctor says an android's computer password will be something mindbogglingly complex that only an android could remember, not her favourite soap star or her first pet. It's her first pet. Actually, they just think it's her pet at first. It actually turns out to be her creator.
  • Family Skeleton Mysteries: Discussed in book 1, when Sid chastises Georgia for using a rather obvious password for her computer - her daughter's name - and not even switching out the "i" in "Madison" for a 1.
  • In "Feminine Endings" by Neil Gaiman, the woman's computer password is her first name, which the author points is hardly very secure.
  • In Stephen King's novel Firestarter, the personnel at the secret government agency "The Shop" apparently all use four-letter dictionary words as passwords.
  • In Foucault's Pendulum, one character's computer has an ultra-complex security system which would take years to pass via random guessing, as the protagonist calculates. It asks the question "Do You Know The Password?". The correct answer is No. Yes, just the word "No". (There's a deeper reason for this: In order to gain knowledge, you have to admit that you don't know a specific thing.)
  • Harry Potter:
    • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Inverted: Sir Cadogan's ridiculously complicated and often-changing passwords prove to be too much for Neville Longbottom's notoriously poor memory, so Neville writes them down... and Sirius Black steals them. This is another chronic problem in Real Life.
    • Dumbledore's passwords to the Headmaster's Office tended to be his favorite candies. Knowing this, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry gets into the office with a brute force attack. Although he does use ones that wizards won't necessarily be familiar with (muggle sweets like Sherbet Lemons), and ones that they won't expect (cockroach cluster).
    • The Slytherin password at one point in Chamber of Secrets is "Pureblood". Note that the Slytherins are infamous for Fantastic Racism and obsess over the stuff.
    • The Chamber of Secrets itself is opened by simply telling it to open in Parseltongue. Seems justified in that most wizards who were not descendants of Salazar Slytherin cannot speak the language, but Ron manages to brute force it in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by repeatedly trying gibberish that sounds like Parseltongue. It helps that Ron was in Harry's presence both times Harry used the Parseltongue command "Open", so he had some idea of how it sounded.
    • The Ravenclaw dormitory bypasses this problem entirely by not using a password to enter. Instead, people have to solve a riddle to get in, ensuring that whoever wants to get in will get a little smarter each time. It does bring up the fact that those not in Ravenclaw can enter the dormitory, if they are smart enough to solve the riddle. The intention may have been that if you can solve the riddle, you're enough of a Ravenclaw to enter. There are a number of hints throughout the books that the founders of Hogwarts didn't intend for students to be nearly as divided as they've ended up. This also serves them rather well in book 7. The Carrows can't solve the riddles, and need someone else to let them in. This may have made Ravenclaw dormitory one of the more secure places in the school.
    • The Marauder's Map has a passphrase that admittedly may not be incredibly easy to guess, but Word of God says that Fred and George were able to make it work because the map reveals more and more of itself, the closer you get to the correct phrase. Considering that the Map demonstrates at least some elements of the Marauders' personalities, it's possible that it only provides such hints if it likes the person who's guessing.
  • In Havana Bay, a sequel to Gorky Park, Arkady Renko must try to figure out the password to a deceased retired KGB officer's computer. The narrative snarks about how a highly experienced spy used the name of his pet as his computer password.
  • In William Gibson's short story Johnny Mnemonic, the titular protagonist has some sensitive data stored his head by an information broker, and the data can only be retrieved when the broker recites a password to Johnny. Said broker is noted to be a huge fan of a particular music band, to the point of having had plastic surgery to look like the band's front man. When the broker is killed and Johnny is forced to retrieve the password by other means, he's nonplussed to discover that the password is the name of the band.
  • Journey to Chaos: Dengel guarded the final door to his final lair with a password that had to be entered with mana. It is the only secret that he didn't tell Eric, but he made it so plainly obvious that Eric could guess, D-E-N-G-E-L.
  • The outlaws in The Last Unicorn have the opposite problem. Their passwords are so complex and change so often that they can't remember them. They solve this by making the new password a giraffe call. But giraffes don't make any noise ... ah, that's the genius of it. You have to give the call three times: two long and one short.
  • In a parody of Smiley's People in The Little Book of Mornington Crescent, the password to enter the MI 7 safe house is "I am a Jehovah's Witness." When Smirkey arrives for his secret meeting, there are two men in dark suits with copies of The Watch Tower already there.
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • A door has an inscription above it, which Gandalf interprets as "Speak, friend, and enter." After trying a few things, he (or, in the movie, Frodo) realized that he assumed the wrong punctuation—the inscription actually read "Say 'friend' and enter." The password was "mellon", the Elvish word for "friend". Justified, it isn't actually a password, merely a test if the reader knew elvish. The gate was specifically built to trade only with elves in the first place, who could be considered friends by default; the word was more like a trigger to open the door than an actual password. When he figures it out, Gandalf muses how such a password could only come about in far less suspicious times.
    • In the parody of this scene in Bored of the Rings, Goodgulf tries all sorts of magic words to open the door. Then he notices the knob...
    • Also parodied in Dmitry Puchkov's Gag Dub of the LOTR movies, where the password in this scene is the word "password". The exchange (translated from Russian) goes like this:
      Fyodor: Wait a minute, is that some kind of puzzle? "Say password and enter". What is Elvish for "password"?
      Pendalf: Der Parole.
    • Surely inevitable parody in Discworld, when Granny Weatherwax encounters a similar situation in Witches Abroad:
      Then she stood back, hit the rock sharply with her broomstick and spake thusly: "Open up, you little sods!"
    • There is a joke on the net where Gandalf turns his cloak inside out (with the inner side being black) and demands to "Open, in the name of Mordor". Probably based on an incident in the actual book (Fellowship of the Ring) in which the Nazgûl, who wear black cloaks, knock on a door and say this line. Ignoring them doesn't make them go away, of course, it just invites them to break the door down.
    • Hilariously parodied in this page of DM of the Rings, where the party (with Gandalf, as an NPC, being completely ignored) thinks of ways to open the door, such as: picking the hinges off, burning it, pouring water on it so it freezes and shatters the stone by expanding, blowing it up, tunneling the way in, and so on... Much later:
      Party Member 1: So we're agreed... You guys go find a tree, cut it down, and haul the trunk back here. Dave and I will assemble the scaffolding, and Frank will tie all of the ropes together.
      Party Member 2: Now all we need is a pulley.
      Gandalf (the DM): Oh for crying out loud! The password is "Mellon," you lunatics!
      Party Member 2: Was that supposed to be in-character?
      Party Member 1: Who cares? At least we got the door open.
      Lesson of the Day: No matter how difficult or absurd you make a puzzle, your players will find an even more impossible and preposterous way of solving it.
    • Irregular Webcomic!'s take on this one featured the Knock spell, which is essentially a magical skeleton key.
  • In Lullaby, everyone's password is "password", which is indicative of society's laziness and lack of imagination.
  • In The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, when entering the guarded anarchists' lair, you knock five times and then are asked who you are. The correct response is "Mr. Joseph Chamberlain", an influential British politician of the time. So, a celebrity, but an odd choice for the anarchists!
  • The Many Mysteries of the Finkel Family: When Lara snoops in her dad's laptop, she easily guesses his password: nlcb777, after her and her siblings' initials. Later, when she breaks into Caroline's phone, she gets the PIN right on the first try because she knows Caroline's favorite numbers.
  • The Millennium Series novel The Girl Who Played with Fire has Lisbeth Salander's home security password set to WASP, which is the very conspicuous tattoo she had on her neck. Didn't take much for much for Blomkvist to figure that out. Somewhat justified in that she never expected anyone who knew her to be able to find the place, that it was a standard anti-intrusion alarm which doesn't allow for huge passwords, and regardless of whether or not someone enters the password it alerts Lisbeth to the intrusion.
  • In The Missing Piece of Charlie O'Reilly, Charlie spends hours trying to guess the six-letter password to Brona's wine cellar by punching in various words that have some relevance to her past. Eventually he realizes that the password is the first initials of her and her five lost family members. When he punches them in from oldest to youngest, the lock falls open.
  • There's a short story called Mousetrap which thoroughly averted this trope in an unusual way. Simply knowing the password to a character's computer account proved insufficient to gain access to it, you also had to type it with the correct rhythm, as the computer timed the keystrokes.
  • Another Stephen King example from Mr. Mercedes; the password to Deborah Ann's laptop is Honeyboy, her nickname for Brady, which would be easy to guess for anyone who knows her. Subverted however in because Hodges, Jerome and Holly don't know her, so they still have a hard time figuring out her password. Hodges finally deduces the password when he sees the name written on the back of a photo of Deborah and Brady.
    • For that matter, Brady’s passwords to activate the lights in the basement, starting up his laptops, and, most importantly, deactivate the countdown of the suicide program, are all common words rather than complex letter-number combinations. Still a bit more secure than most examples since the passwords have to be spoken out loud and are protected with voice recognition, but anyone who can mimic Brady’s voice close enough can use them. Like Jerome.
  • The Mummy Monster Game: In book 1, six passwords are required throughout "The Mummy Monster Game" to get past a guardian. The first, being the first challenge of the game, is easy to anyone who knows anything about Egyptian myth ("Who was the wife of Osiris?"), and the other five (the four sons of Horus, and the word "Pharaoh") are given throughout the game well before they're needed in the pyramid where Osiris's body is kept.
  • In Octagon, two programmers responsible for their universe's version of MS-DOS programmed an Override Command into the code, so they could take control of any system with two passwords. Each programmer only knows one of these passwords, to prevent abuse. The problem arises when AI becomes a crapshoot, with one of the passwords programmed into it from the start, and it turns out both programmers used the same password, giving Skynet Lite access to everything that uses an operating system based on MS-BOS.
  • In Olivia Joules And The Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding the terrorists have two electric keypad protected doors which she must get through to escape from their under-water-cave-lair. When threatened the bad guy confesses that the first doors have a numerical sequence of 2468 that Olivia immediately lampshades with a comment of "Isn't that a bit obvious?" Unfortunately that is promptly followed by the second set of doors' code being the even more horrifically predictable 0911, which is rewarded by a roll of the eyes.
  • Played with in the fourth book of The Pendragon Adventure series. The characters go on a massive manhunt for the guy that created a huge virtual paradise that is threatening to collapse at any moment, and who also went into seclusion IN his own said paradise, to stop a huge virus initially made by the Bespectacled Cutie to stop the Big Bad's Evil Plan to topple the world (and by doing so, help his plan all along), almost lose life and limb, AND have to convince the guy to give up the password to get into the main code to purge the virus. The password? Zero. Just...zero. He actually justifies this saying that he knew people would expect it to be a complex password, instead he made it a single digit, throwing off anyone attempting to hack the system.
  • In Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, the password to Mech's lab is "Beebee" (Penny's mom's nickname). Penny's not sure if this means Mech has a crush on her mother, or if it means her father designed the security system and Mech never changed the default.
  • Justified in Eric Idle's sci-fi novel The Road to Mars. Carlton, the robot, is trying to break into a computer using the most advanced hacking algorithms possible. Eventually he thinks of looking for a simple word as the password. He explains that password breaking programs have become so complex that it's possible to fool them by going under their level of complexity with very simple passwords.
  • In Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy, the titular character asks a friend for advice on safecracking and he tells her how most people choose to use numbers corresponding to birthdays or anniversaries or other important events rather than random numbers (she needs to help some people open a safe so her friend won't have to shift through dog poop for the key, long story). Later, Sammy uses this information to crack open a safe in her church and solve a mystery (it used the Father's birthday).
  • In Save the Enemy, Zoey's dad is an Ayn Rand-obsessed libertarian. She breaks into his laptop by correctly guessing that his password is JohnGalt123.
  • Saving Max: Marianne has an embroidery with the words Every good boy does fine. The password to her most incriminating files is "EGBDF."
  • Played around with in A Series of Unfortunate Events, the passwords to get into the VFD headquarters is a mixture of the easily guessable kind (sirisaacnewton) and the ridiculously difficult (a page long thesis on the themes present in the novel Anna Karenina).
  • Averted and subverted in Sewer, Gas & 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 by the supercomputer itself, giving her false information.
  • Siren Novels: In Undercurrent, Vanessa breaks into her dad's computer by correctly guessing his password: "Charlotte Bleu," the siren who is Vanessa's biological mother.
  • Star Wars Legends: At the start of Galaxy of Fear: Planet Plague, just enough of a dead Imperial-aligned scientist's notes are decoded that Tash Arranda knows he had something to do with a Project Starscream. She soon ends up at a computer in an Imperial medical facility, and through some major serendipity finds that "Starscream" is the high-level passcode for everything from Classified Information, to the elevators.
    • In the Dark Forces Saga, Kyle Katarn, a former Imperial stormtrooper, notes that many Imperials don't even bother changing the default security code for vehicles, which is 0 0 0 0.
  • In the Sten series of novels by Allan Cole & Chris Bunch, the secret network for automated mining and distribution of the Unobtainium that was the monopoly of the Eternal Emperor's power had its several command stations guarded by no password at all. As the stations had to be dirt-simple in their circuitry (due to the requirement of possibly needing to run decades or centuries without maintenance) and could not use complex physical locks or passwords (due to the requirement of possibly needing to be accessed by a man on the run without the resources to reconstruct complex electronic keys and who might not be in possession of all, or any, of his memories), the security system was simply set to self-destruct the installation if more than one person ever entered the control room at a time. The Eternal Emperor's reasoning was that no intruder with the remotest amount of sense would enter a hidden base that was heavily booby-trapped and could contain any number of potential ambushers without taking along armed backup or a bomb squad, and that only the legitimate owner would dare to walk in by himself. The theory fell down when the protagonist, a black-ops qualified demolitions expert commando, did a one-man ninja run on the base — although the titular Sten did muse at his exceptional luck in that his partner Alex was unavoidably busy doing something else in another star system at the time, as if he'd been available Sten would have brought him along.
  • In Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Ben Caxton's girlfriend Jill has kidnapped the Man From Mars and needs to hide out in Ben's apartment, which has a sound lock. She tries the old password, which doesn't work. Then she thinks, maybe see if Ben is home, so she presses the announce button and says, "Ben, this is Jill" and the door opens. She's about to complain to him that he didn't open the door when she tried the first time, only to discover he's not there; she had accidentally guessed the access code!
  • Played with in Temple. William Race comments fairly early on that his brother's passwords are always Elvis's army serial number. Later on, when trying to defuse an Earth-Shattering Bomb set up by a thought-executed scientist, Race and a friend attempt to guess the password. Race realizes that, thanks to the scientist's pride, he would want to stick it to the world in some way with his last act, and punches in the execution date. It works. Later, Race is defusing another bomb of the same type. However, his brother designed the codes on this one, and so it's Elvis's army serial number.
  • True Names displays a contrast in "conventional" online security (passcodes, tokens, dedicated terminals) and what the hacker underground uses instead of it. Getting into their online community center requires first navigating a changing cyberspace landscape with also changing challenges and responses hidden in subtle interactions with the environment (so that a single complete decrypted session log won't make it clear how to follow you, and using an intrinsically obfuscated UI to hide what the challenges were), followed by interacting with a regularly updated AI guardian who tests your current mental awareness and coding style under real-time pressure while interrogating you about yourself, people you should know and events you've attended there, both to check for others using your equipment plus stupidly made notes plus interrogation results and give you chances to give a Covert Distress Code.
  • Lampshaded and averted in Von Neumanns 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.
  • In Welcome to Night Vale, this is played for laughs when Diane claims to, as a "party trick", be able to use people's personalities to work out their passwords, which include "'WhoAmIReally' followed by nineteen question marks" and "A11isL0ss".

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