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Today I got my iPhone replaced by Apple as it was presenting some weird symptoms.
I upgraded the iOS and restored from backup but few hours later I discovered that the hotspot password was replaced with something I never wrote soaked4963.
Is this a bug in their iOS upgrade and/or restore mechanism?
iOS auto-generates a hotspot password by default, mine is a word followed by four digits, just like yours. I suspect that the hotspot password just isn't backed up, so the new phone created a new default one.
It's not an issue really, just replace it with whatever you want. If you want to keep the old one to avoid re-entering it on your devices, but don't remember it, you should be able to find it by going into Keychain Access (Applications > Utilities) on a Mac that connected previously. Double click on the entry corresponding to the hotspot name, and there should be a checkbox for "Show password".
If you use encrypted backups, your backup will store your passwords (email etc, including the hot spot password). If you do not use encrypted backups, you need to reenter all passwords, including the hot spot one, which will be reentered by a random one as explained by CanuckSkier.
