With all due respect, is it really safe to be telling how you or your friends/relatives make your passwords?

This troper uses the first letters of the character names in her favorite slash pairings. For example, if I liked Sephiroth/Cloud, Sasuke/Naruto, Usagi/Misaki, and Nowaki/Hiroki, my password would be scsnumnh. Otherwise I'll mix words in different languages into my passwords.

My passwords are always either favored songs or my cat's name in 1337 writing...Anyone who would happen to have met my cat could very easily get half my accounts.

My old password was my kitty's name... admitely I never call him anything but "My kitty" Online. I've progressed to something a bit more secure anyway.

Averted in the case of this lurker's email address password: another0xehanort1braig2dilan3even4aeleus5ienzo6. Talk about password security! I did briefly consider doing an even more complicated one, but-- What's that? You want to know my email server, and email address? T-O-O BAD!

My brother does this literally. His password is currently KatanaSushi or Sword (raw)Fish(in rice)

Which is quite absurd if you consider that the main ingredient is Sushi is rice, while fish is entirely optional.

For a more accurate translation, use KatanaSakana.

This troper's best friend and her family is aware that her password for things like her Facebook and email is her cat's name. Her school's computers require you to change your password every once in a while, so she's branched out to swordfish.

This troper will use the occasional easy password, but only for dummy accounts that he might as well submit to BugMeNot.com. The rest of the time, it's inverted - this troper is insanely paranoid and will use passwords that even he could never guess if he forgot them. He also does this with security questions. In fact, this troper once forgot one of his passwords and couldn't even guess or crack his own password, try as he might. He eventually remembered that he had saved that password in plaintext form, RSA encrypted with a different password. He has no idea what he would've done if he had forgotten THAT one as well.

1}} This troper used the default blank password for his (now) old Belkin wireless router. However, I also remembered to turn on the option that makes it so that if you want to access the admin functions, you would have to use a computer connected by a Ethernet cable (as the only actual computer that was on my little network was a desktop machine, it was fairly secure). Even though I've switched over to a Linksys router and picked a better password, I still use the "hardwired only" option for admin functions, and even if I were to allow wireless connections for that, I would ''never'' allow admin access from the internet. That's just a disaster waiting to happen.

When this troper was younger, she used her teddy bear's name for all her passwords. Nowadays, she still uses it occasionally, but only for accounts that won't cause her trouble if they're hacked into. The rest of the time, she deliberately averts this trope by basing her passwords on dreams and story ideas she hasn't told ''anyone'' about. Her mother, however, uses her maiden name or this troper's formerly always-used password for all her own passwords, mainly because she doesn't want to write them down and thus picks something that will be easy for her aging brain to remember.

This troper keeps one password for things that don't matter at all, for the most part these are various forums and forced registrations. Tvropes is among the sites that use a varreint.

This troper, to be absolutely sure, vowed use nothing but {{Doom}} sprite names. Since then, it was never cracked once.

This Troper's Dad always, ''always'' '''without fail''' uses her name, birthdate or name and birthdate in his passwords.

Subverted in this troper's case. Her password for her laptop is six letters long and starts with a k, her roommates found this out and her beloved cat's name is also six letters long and starts with a k. They tried to get into her laptop using her cat's name, only to be confused when it didn't work. Her actual password is the name of an imaginary friend she had when she was little who she never told anyone about.

This Troper, up until halfway through high school, had 3 levels of security: "Don't care" which was dictionary words, "kinda secure" which was ''properly capitalized and punctuated'' dictionary words (Really.) and "cannot fall into the wrong hands" with MD5 hashes shacking up with random leetspeek sentences.

This troper has discovered the perfect algorithm for password generation he uses frequently. Easy to remember for you, impossible to find out for others, long enough to withstand brute force. Simply take a verse from a poem you can recite, then take the first letter of every word with capitalization, and the punctuation too, then insert a little bit of 13375p34k. If the poem is long enough, the password will be practically impossible to crack (at least while quantum computers aren't commonplace). Sadly, many people around him don't even care about security -- this troper tried to convince them, but they are just too ignorant. For fucks sake, abc123 and password, people?!

This troper has several passwords that are his father's name. When more security is required, it is his father's name leetified.

This troper used the word for "cat" in her own secret language as a password for a while.

Oh? What type of language was that? This troper's word for cat was "Felokidokyo".

This troper uses two different passwords depending on which e-mail he's using at the time. Favourite book for favoured e-mail. Most Powerful Black Magic Spell for the background e-mail used for things he doesn't want others to see. Oh, and there's another one for purely numeric passwords. This troper has also thought of a joke where, instead of "swordfish" the password is: is no password. Either using the words themselves or there actually isn't a password.

Back in the days of dial-up internet, password-protected to keep us chibblins from tying up the phone lines, this troper's father ALWAYS picked a type of wine for the password. 6 letters? Merlot, easy. And then when we inevitably figured it out (...or he told us...), he'd just change it to a different kind.

My password is always the same thing. It's my first Neopets account, and I use it for everything. Please don't hack into my stuff.

This troper tends to have the same password for everything, though he has a few. His secure one is about two paragraphs long. But not for any good reason since a keylogger/spyprogram wont care, and will just copy it when it gets sent.

This troper's laptop password changes every time someone else needs to log in to it. other account in use for people not needing admin. privileges.

This one time, my girlfriend was trying to access my apartment's wireless internet through her laptop, but I couldn't remember the password, having not needed it in months. She, based solely on her knowledge of me, quickly figured out that it was "Korridai".

This troper always uses phrases that describe or are important to her in some way. However, they are still hard to guess, as she knows a ''lot'' of pop culture; the only one that's relatively easy is obscured with a weird bastardization.

Not exactly this trope, but related. The door for my school's gym locker room is always locked, so once I tried knocking on the door and saying "swordfish". A gym teacher came by to unlock the door shortly after.

I've had a set password I've used since I was twelve. Fortunately, it's hard to guess, a conglomeration of letters followed by a string of numbers. My password hint is always, "What, are you stupid? It's the same as always, brain-trust."

I overheard one of my fellow high school students telling a story in which he, on a whim, cracked some system which boasted a 40-character password. Said password? 1234567890123456789012345678901234567890

My password is always the exact same thing, my school computer password from 8th grade (which I had to use so often that I ended up perminently scaring into my memory). It's a series of 6 numbers that are in no meaningful order, which I can type so fast that even people standing next to me have a hard time guessing what it is. My hint is: "The same one as always" or "You're the reason there's a password in the 1st place".

Go to any store with computer displays that are on the password screen and try to get in. Hint: The usual password is "Password".

This troper has not traditionally used too terribly secure passwords, but tends to use one of three: a total nonsequitur, a reference to a SF story ark he's been carrying around in his head for two decades, and a reference to a TV show he's not a fan of. And the password on the wireless router? Well, there's an admin password, but the AP is left open because two of the three wireless cards in the house are B cards and using WEP security is pointless.

This troper, in a 3-way conversation on MSN, tried to convince his friend to change her password to something random, but she would't listen, instead listening to the other friend who suggests more recognizable passwords like "ihatemymom". And on another note, this troper has a convenient way of creating secure passwords. It's called "mashing the keyboard and then taking a substring of the resulting nonsense."

For a personal example, during some job training I stayed at an apartment complex rented by my company. The gate is locked with a numberpad. Of course, the code is simply the address of the main building. This is made even more hilarious because the building's address has only two distinct digits, meaning those two keys are very worn out.

In order to get passed my high school's web page blocking system, you have to log in as an administrator. The username/password combo? The town's name, and then the school name (Well, the initials). I also know a lot of people who use Password or Password1. Some people argue that since it's so obvious, most people wouldn't guess it.

After several years of battling it out with students, my high school switched to using passwords such as $t0P!t, t34ch3r$0n1y and d3T3n7!0n. They get changed almost every week because of the password-Facebook-groups. Whoever is coming up with fifty ways to spell "stop it," "detention" and "teacher's only" using numbers and symbols is a genius.

Or at any rate, @n 3l1t3 h@x0r...

This Troper's mother, she suspects, is a fan of either "[her name/her husband's name]1" or default passwords. This Troper was able to figure out the Parental Controls password after determining it was a simple four-digit number, and watching her finger movements from across the room (because goodness forbid there's an extra hour of computer time). This troper uses her OC's full names (as well as some older passwords, mostly for nostalgia points). Though when you've got OCs named things like Stathis Michelakos (it's Greek) or Grant Sturnberg, your stuff is pretty much secure.

This troper's father always uses the same passwords without fail. It's mostly obvious stuff, like high school sports team, job description, pet names, etc. Once, to prove he broke himself of the habit, he dared her to break a newly set laptop password and she guessed it after two tries: His military call sign. He just really has issues remembering random passwords.

My mother's computer has a password merely for the fact that it asked for one when the OS was installing. It's her last name.... But of course, the hint that pops up is "your name", so when I tried to get on her computer after I hadn't for a while, it took me a few tries.... her normal first name, the full version of her first name, a diferent name her nieces and nephews use, my ''dad's'' last name and then it dawned on me.... ''her last name!'' Yes, we all have idiotic moments....

I have a friend who uses the first forty decimal places of pi for his password. He has trouble typing it out on keyboards without numpads.

My brother and I are latchkey kids. Our password to let each other in is swordfish

This troper has a pattern for passwords: Letters representing the website's name, the number just beyond her birthdate, an underscore, her pseudonym, her favorite mythical creature, and fire.

This troper's parents always use their [=DOB=] as [=PIN=]s, or "security" as a password. Myself, I use "password" as a password (like on my Linux laptop), but there is nothing worth anything on the laptop, and my main desktop has no password whatsoever but my parents don't even go near it.

Two communities this troper are part of have standard passwords for things like private servers when playing online games and such. One of these also has a standard server name, "Planet Hexen" (which is a name fairly unrelated to the community, but we do play {{Doom}}). The passwords in question are "pai" and "weedle".

This troper once had a big fight with his sister, then, as punishment, his dad changed the password of this troper's account on the family's pc. The password was this troper birthday. Nice one dad...

When this troper started a computer science class, the first day was stymied by the computers being locked out. Our teacher didn't know the new passwords and thus set the room to cracking it. This troper found the password within 10 minutes. It was 4 characters, all caps, and the ''initials of the school''. This happened to be the administrator password for ''every'' computer in the school, giving this troper completely unfettered access to every computer on campus. I didn't think to use this great power for evil, but created my own admin-level account on a few computers before they got smart changed the generic password to something I never bothered to crack.

This troper was tremendously frustrated by the DVD parental controls on the PS2 he bought secondhand, as he hadn't thought to ask the friend he's bought it from for the password and they were now out of contact. A sigh of relief was had by all when he tried entering all zeroes for the password and it worked- because the previous owner, even if he knew the PS2 had these controls activated, wouldnt've had any idea how to change them.

This troper had set the password for the DVD parental controls set to 7777 since no one aside from him and his friend uses it.

This troper was playing a game for drama class in which one person pretends to be driving a car, and constantly picks up hitchhickers. The new person in the car acts as a stereotype, and everyone else in the "car" has to take on that stereotype. This tropet, upon entering, said, in a deep voice, "Swordfish." The "driver"'s response was "Hello, Mr. Swordfish."

Not an exact example and kinda verges on the {{Its a Small Net After All}} trope but a friend of mine mentioned having an account in an...ahem...adult website but was pensive about saying his account name. Knowing his numerous usernames and making a quick guess on which one he may most likely use, it took me less than a minute to find his account.

-> '''Him:''' Not telling you though.

-> '''Me:''' You don't have to,

-> '''Him:''' o_O

If it'll allow me to get away with a two character password, I'll use one from an old book. I can type it fast enough that people don't even realize I did. When I worked for IBM, someone called in all pissed off that they'd broken their SecurID (small keyfob with a number that changes every 60 seconds) and that they couldn't get in by using 'override' for the password.

This Troper has a story which parodies this trope. The main characters are a BattleCouple of spies, and are also extremely kinky. Neither of them has swordfish as their password, but their safeword is swordfish.

This troper is quite bad at this because she uses the same password for everything, and it includes her birthday... except that her real birthday isn't on the date she tells everyone it is. Happy hunting!

This troper, for a time, had most of her passwords set as NCC-1701. Any fellow trekkie could have hacked her easily.

This troper's father once locked my computer at the BIOS level in order to prevent me from accessing it. Now, anyone can just flip the BIOS jumper and reset the password (it's a design feature, really), but given this troper's father's password choices, it took less than two minutes of brute-forcing to identify it as his grandmother's surname (which, of course, I knew as well). That said, this troper isn't much better; my low-security passwords are an electronics component used in a puzzle in an old point-and-click game that this troper adored as a child and will thus absolutely shill at the slightest provocation *cough* , or simply a foreign word for "thief" from an appropriate language.

My passwords were mostly the name of a theme park I wanted to visit. My parents created it when they helped me make my first email account at age 11.

In junior high me and my friend had an IT lesson and we got a little bored during it. Since it was possible to access to the teachers' password-protected database though any computer because of the network we decited to guess the password as a little game to kill the time. It only took four attemps before we got in. The word? The full name of the school and the year it was built.

This troper had a class (Computer-Aided Design) in a room next to a research lab, whose wireless signals "leaked" to the room he was. The password? The lab's name. The password for the alarm which locked the doors? The room number.

Averted: The password to this troper's computer is impossible to guess unless you read the password hint AND have played warhammer 40k. With the latter point, you'll be able to guess it, but you'd probably need a lot of guesses. I set this password to keep my sister out of my user part and, to date, she has never found out what it is (even though she has known about my hobby since I started it). Almost played stright with an account I wanted to make for Runescape, which was going to be my favourite beverage, with a number 1 after it. Apparently, it wasn't long enough. The password planned? cupoftea1. COMPLETELY played stright with my school account (since I can't change it: I made the password when I was 13), which is the name of my favourite childhood toy iguana (which I will not post here, for obvious reasons).

My school used to use "password", until a friend of mine accidentally hacked the entire system and changed all the passwords in the lab to "[hername]1". It was pretty hilarious since she's not computer-savvy in the least and nobody (including herself) has any idea how she pulled that off.

This troper completely averts this. Not only are her passwords most likely something completely weird, they are also ridiculously long. The one she had for her account in school was more then 50 characters long. Cue the others staring as she enters it flawlessly.

I once salvaged a computer and needed to get to the bios settings. After a while I gave up and tried the "four most commonly used passwords" from Hackers. It was "sex". My mind was blown.

This troper was setting up wifi internet in his rented university townhouse. There was some trouble installing the router with the cable guy, so while This troper and his friends were waiting, we tried to access the other networks around us. One such network was named "Potato". The password was "salad".

This troper uses the entire prologue of LOVELESS from Crisis Core (in Japanese), complete with punctuation and capitalization, as her password. Many of her friends know what it is, but haven't been able to access her laptop since none of them can remember even the English verse, much less a "bunch of foreign gibberish".

Averted for me, I can safely say that you can't guess my password without reading the hint and knowing me and my fandom. The hint? "My favourite pairing". Only my best friend knows that, and I trust her enough to let it stay that way.

This trope has been taken quite literally by me. The password for a region I created on NationStates is swordfish. Just in case anyone from Nation States is looking here, however, I shan't reveal the name of the aforementioned region.

The computers where this troper works all have the same "hey, can I get out of screen saver mode now?" password. It's the default user name on the system. To be fair, any passwords that actually need to be secure (like the one to get onto the internet, installed after too many workstations were packed full of malware) ''are'' secure.

The first few years he was on the internet, this troper was a magnificent example. I used the same dictionary word for every service. More recently, I've averted it. I've written a shell script that generates lowercase alphanumeric passwords form /dev/random. I have a different one for every service, and they are kept in a dead tree book in my desk, so that I don't have to remember them. Passwords that must be secure against an adversary with physical access to my machine (drive encryption, Truecrypt containers, etc.) are generated, written down, memorized, and promptly burned or eaten. Counting those plus the ones I've inadvertently memorized through frequent use, I have 96 completely random alphanumeric characters running around my head.

This troper used to use the date of he and his then girlfriend's first date as his password for damn near everything for the two and a half years they dated. Then the broke up, somewhat painfully, and he changed it everywhere he could so he didn't have to keep her on his mind. However, it remains the password for (sorry, feeling paranoid) something that one doesn't want falling into the hands of others despite how little he's got in there. Though process - practically no one but us knew the date to begin with. Now that she's my ex, it exists in vanishingly few places and you'd need to know what you were looking for to find it out. More secure than anything else I use.

My family's approach to passwords: Pick one that is so obvious about yourself that nobody would ever suspect that you'd actually use it. This is actually quite effective, especially if said password is staring people in the face. You know how the hardest things to find are the ones left out in the open? Same basic concept. --HumanTorch2

At this troper's university, pretty much all computers have the same Administrator password. Also, many wireless networks there are unencrypted, but have MAC address protection, which does nothing for security AT ALL - MAC addresses are transmitted in unencrypted text, it's possible to snoop on network traffic using a program like Wireshark, and it's very easy to use a program like Kismet to find out what MAC addresses are being used.

Back when I was in high school, I was frequently called on (and occasionally called out of classes) to deal with problems with faculty and staff computers. On one occasion, I was called to the career center, where they found themselves with a computer on which the BIOS password had been lost. Although I had developed a reputation for being a bit of a computer genius at the school at the time, this one was admittedly a bit out of my league, and it would probably have been necessary to clear the CMOS to fix the problem (this was back in the early Nineties on what was even back then an older PS\2 system.) Nonetheless, in an attempt to make it look like I knew what I was doing, I tried a few things. Before admitting that I couldn't solve the problem, I noted that the prompt for the password looked a bit like a key. Sure enough, I tried typing "key" and it worked.

At my school, every student's initial password to log onto a computer is "student" or the acronym of the school district. No teacher in the school district even bothers to tell their students to change their passwords. I eventually had to change it after all my files got deleted including all of my work for a class. And the password I changed it to happens to be the same password for many things, albeit something I practically never mention. Completely averted with another one of my passwords as it is a long, completely random number.

This troper inverts this trope. I use a different password every time so no one can hack into my account.

This troper was once complaining to my mother about how I always forgot my password to my University account because I only go on it twice a year and she said "Oh! Just make it something easy to remember like !" She actually got really offended when I pointed out what a bad idea that was. (Then proceeded to tell me to use my siblings names, pet's names, etc)

At this troper's university, the security for student accounts is pretty tight. The password must be 8 characters, 1 letter, 1 number, can't be an old password, etc, and expires after 90 days. SOP is to rotate a set of passwords. This troper forgot the third in his rotation. After trying 2, he gave up. For the next 60-ish days, his password is..."3rdPassword".

Don't waste your time finding out where I go to school, though, the password only allows you access to the internet on campus, and any papers I have saved on school computers. That is to say, none.

At this troper's university, the security on a student account is almost excessive; while it doesn't require any numbers or caps, the so called "passphrase" must:

Contain at least 15 and no more than 127 characters;.

Use at least four unique characters (letters, numbers, or symbols);

Use at least four words. "Word" is defined here as two or more distinct letters; words must be separated by one or more spaces or other non-letters, '''not including''' numbers or the underscore character.

At this troper's university, the the common opinion is that the security has been done by an OCD paranoiac with '''a lot''' of time on his hands. Along with the normal at least 1 capital letter, at least 1 digit, at least one lower-case letter, it shouldn't contain any of the following anywhere in the password: patterns of three or more characters (so not only 123xxxx but even 12xxxx3 would fail. Same with abxxxxcx), recognised word (so far this troper can confirm that English is supported, although random button mashing passwords, revealed that it also check French, German, Finnish, Welsh, and Swedish. After determining that, the better practice was to remove any vowels, as the chance of randomly guessing a word in any language is lower. But not non-existent), repeating five or more repeating characters, part of the name of the university or derivatives, real or fantasy names, computer terms, commands, brands, postcodes (or anything that looks like one), and any of those backwards. The password needs to be changed every year and it's usually easier to hit the keyboard with a your palm spread, then remove vowels and write down what you got, than to think of a suitable password. Moreover, if the University detects that you've used your password for any other site, your account will be locked and the password must be changed.

So in summation, basically it's a sentence, spaces and all. Or better yet numbers and symbols too. Good luck cracking that.

"This is my password." "Michigan Institute of Technology." "I'm on the internet." "The password is swordfish."

This troper was very dissapointed that his church's WiFi password was "Jesus."

The password security at this Tropers old workplace is both very draconian, and extremly lax at the same time. It must be greater than 6 characters, contain at least one letter, one number, and one caps, and must be reset every 45 days. No passwords are allowed to be reused as far back as the last 6. Seems to be not so bad, BUT if you fail to type it in correctly twice, you will be locked out and it will need to be reset by our IT department. Our IT department is excempt from the above rules, will reset a password whenever someone calls just so long as they know the login, and will always use the same password. The default password they enter never needs to be reset, and most employee's simply use it so as to be less likely to lock themselves out.

This troper, being incredibly lazy, used to have 123456 as almost all of her passwords, at least until they started demanding numbers ''and'' letters with the password being at least 8 characters long.

This tropers mother, after saying i can't go on her computer, added a password, and a hint, the hint was "hint" and the password was "password".

This troper recommends 1234567'''9'''.

When this troper was a teenager, she vandalised a classmate's website after he scoffed at her computer skills. It took her about two minutes to get in, mostly because she didn't except him to be so stupid as to use his first name as a password.

My friend, when in our days of Fanfiction.net, decided for her password to be "cheese". And, not satisfied with that, told everyone about her brilliant idea. I came to confirm and it was true, but most people thought "she can't be that idiotic".

This troper, being lazy, has taken to using one password for every account she uses. It's the name of her former favorite {{Pokemon}}, but for obvious reasons she doesn't pass that information around.

Averted with this troper who is very paranoid about someone hacking his information, so has created a large number of random passwords and usernames that even he doesn't know. They are written down in an encrypted file that he can copy and paste from. So unless someone can somehow guess that his Bank of America username is [=FeU6D2Lx6lp1=] and his password is [=p19CWk9GJ4zA=], he's all set. Wait...DAMMIT!!!Naturally, these aren't his actual passwords. It's a joke.]]

My mom's password is always the name of one of the family pets, or a reference to them (stupiddog, etc.). If it asks for a number, she always uses 444. My dad isn't better; he always uses the name of one of his favorite classical musicians with the number 697 as a password. The one time my friend hacks my Facebook and posts a silly message, I get a half-hour lecture about secure passwords. Little do they know, I could easily get into any of their accounts just as easily.

One evening this troper's internet went out (right in the middle of reading some amusing tropes, of course). Feeling put out but not expecting anything, she started tinkering with nearby networks to see if she could find any that were carelessly left open. A few moments later she was very surprised when she suddenly had access to her neighbor's locked network. The password? "hello".

I use regular words for my passwords. They're kind of obscure, though... I hope...