19 Votes Vote

Spoofing your MAC address

Posted by ftremblay 251 days ago Mac Tips
If you've been reading my Tweets, you probably know that I have been in Florida over the holidays. My hotel thankfully had free WiFi, but it was provided by AT&T. All I've got to say is that what everyone has been saying about AT&T is so right. Their service is awful, even just for WiFi. The speed was absolutely horrendous and even worse, they completed blocked us out after downloading a mere 500 MB. I know a lot of ISPs throttle, but to completely block the connection was quite extreme. I was lucky enough to have WiFi still working on my iPhone (because I hadn't downloaded too much on my iPhone!) so I did some research. I was hoping they would unblock our connection after a while, but they didn't so I had to find another way. I was really surprised how easy it was to hack my way back into the network. They had simply blocked my MAC address.

Even though this goes against everything I learned in my Cisco networking training that says that MAC address filtering is very secure because it is hardware, it is very easy to spoof. First, you want to write down your current MAC address (not really necessary because rebooting will revert your settings back to your real MAC address anyway). Here are all the steps:

1. Enter "ifconfig en1 | grep ether" in Terminal to get your current MAC address.

2. Disconnect from any wireless network but don't turn WiFi off. To do so, go to the Airport menu, click on "Join other network...", enter a fake name, click "Join" and click "Cancel" while it is trying to join. This will log you off of any wireless network.

3. Enter "sudo ifconfig en1 ether 01:23:45:67:89:ab" while replacing "01:23:45:67:89:ab" with the MAC address you want to assign to your Mac.

4. Enter your administrator password to execute the sudo command.

5. Enter "ifconfig en1 | grep ether" again to see if it worked. That's it!

Now, to switch back:

6. Repeat the procedure to set it back to your original MAC address or reboot.

Attached file(s)

Screen shot 2009-12-27 at 11.31.09 PM.png
Screen shot 2009-12-27 at 11.29.33 PM.png

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Comments

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manparria
198 days ago - Show / Hide
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wanjuabkoe1
182 days ago - Show / Hide
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dallarosa
163 days ago
Here you just have to be careful to enter a valid address (hexadecimal values, fixed size, fixed format, etc) so I'd advise any person who doesn't understand of networking to at least take a look on Wikipedia or something what's a MAC Address.
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BookAllofThem
38 days ago
Many thanks.

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