The story of the hunter2 meme

In 2004, a portion of an IRC log was submitted to Bash, a website which records humorous or odd IM or IRC conversations. In it, a user by the name of AzureDiamond was tricked into giving away his password, which was hunter2. The exact date of upload is unknown, but the first recorded date in the Wayback Machine was June 4th, 2004.

A copy of the original bash.org chat transcript:

<Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
<Cthon98> see! *********
<AzureDiamond> hunter2
<AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
<Cthon98><AzureDiamond> *******
<Cthon98> thats what I see
<AzureDiamond> oh, really?
<Cthon98> Absolutely
<AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
<AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
<Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
<Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as ******* *******
<AzureDiamond> awesome!
<AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw?
<Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
<AzureDiamond> oh, ok.

via https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hunter2

This echoes the principle from XKCD 538 (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/538:_Security): the simplest way to obtain someone's password is often just to ask for it, rather than using complex cracking methods.