It is not a password. It is a placeholder — one that escaped its cage.
Somewhere, in a forgotten PHP-based IRC bot from the early 2010s, a developer wrote: phbot manager password
And here lies the irony: the warning became the key . It is not a password
$config['phbot_manager_password'] = 'CHANGE_ME'; But as with so many things, it was never changed. The bot — let's call it PHBot (possibly short for "PHP Bot" or "Phenom Bot") — was used for channel moderation, automated greetings, or perhaps less noble tasks like spamming or scraping. The "manager" was a privileged user who could issue .shutdown , .join #channel , or .say commands. Over time, the configuration file leaked
Over time, the configuration file leaked. Pastebin. GitHub commits. Public IRC scrollback logs. Security scanners began indexing the phrase. Attackers started trying it as a literal password.