Alec Muffett

Who is Alec Muffett?

Alec David Edward Muffett is a security evangelist, architect and software engineer. He is principally known for his work on Crack, the original Unix password cracker, and for the CrackLib password-integrity testing library; he is also active in the Open Source software community.

Alec Muffett was born in Pennsylvania, the third child, and only son, of David Joseph Mead Muffett and Kathleen Jubb; his sisters are Louise and Amanda. Alec was educated at Sacred Heart College, Droitwich and University College London, where he studied Astronomy. After graduation he commenced work as a lab assistant and Unix administrator at the university. In 1988 he took a position as Systems Programmer at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, and it was there that he wrote the first version of the dictionary attack tool Crack. He was active on the Zardoz list during this period.

Muffett joined Sun Microsystems in 1992, working initially as a systems administrator. He rose “through the ranks” to become the Principal Engineer for Security, a position which he held until he was retrenched, with many others, in 2009.