MAC address short form of Media Access Control Address, is a address that uniquely identifies you computer. For every network card on your computer there is a MAC address, which comes built-in. This applies to all types of network cards be it Ethernet or WiFi. Whether you are using a wired connection or wireless one, you do need to transfer data from your computer to some other computer. But how does the other computer find your computer? That is where addresses come in. These addresses are actually hard-coded into the network card. These are given to a network adapter in the manufacturing stage itself. And since these addresses are permanent, they are generally used to prevent devices from accessing a particular network. Does this mean they can never be changed? Well, yes. Then what is this article about? One simple word, MAGIC ! The hard-coded MAC address can never be changed but you can spoof the MAC address in your operating system. But before moving on with our spoofing mac address OS X trick, let’s see what does a MAC address look like.
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MAC address is the lower sub-layer of the data link layer in the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model. It is a six-byte number. MAC address is also often referred as the Physical Address. A possible MAC address can be 2F-4D-5B-6E-2A-9C. As you can clearly see it is a 12-digit hexadecimal or 48 bits number. The first 6 digits helps to find the manufacturer, while the last six digits find your device. The manufacturers have already got this special number sequence to find themselves as manufactures. Dell has 00-14-22 at the beginning, Cisco has 00-40-96 and so on. These are often referred as OUI or Organizationally Unique Identifier. The last 6 digits or three bytes is the NIC (Network Interface Controller) specifier. A possible question now arises that why would someone like to change their MAC address? It is for so many reasons. If your network limits access to some MAC addresses, then you can change it and have the network access. If a network filters out access based on MAC address, then you can sniff out a legitimate MAC address, change your MAC address and connect. If you want privacy over surfing or any network activity, you could change your MAC address and be untraceable. You can also bypass certain network restriction by spoofing an authorized MAC address. There are many more reasons one might want to change his/her computers MAC address. Let’s not go to too much detail and begin.
Before changing the MAC address on Mac Computer let’s see how can you look up your MAC address. There are generally three ways to go about it.
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1. Easy
Press and hold the option key, now click on the WiFi icon from the menu bar. You will see couple of things here, look out for “Address:”. The next 12 hexadecimal digits following it is your MAC address. And it tells you the connection name also. Wasn’t it easy?
2. Medium
WiFi Spoof MAC
Open up System Preference and now move on to Network section. Select the network via which you are connected and then click on the Advanced button. Now, select the Hardware tab, the first thing you will see is MAC address.
3. Advanced
This is the toughest one of the all. Open up the terminal and type the command:
ifconfig en0 | grep ether
This actually shows the MAC address for en0 interface. Just change the name of the interface and look for yourself. Was it that difficult?
Now, that we know our MAC address, let us generate some random MAC addresses, in the terminal just type:
openssl rand -hex 6 | sed ‘s/(..)/1:/g; s/.$//’
This will generate a random MAC address. The format of MAC address as earlier mentioned in this article is in the form xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, if you already have one in mind you don’t need to generate one. But keep in mind it should be 12 digits hexadecimal.
changing mac address on macOS sierra or OS X Yosemite or OS X El Capitan or any Mac OS X is just one command, open up the terminal and type in:
sudo ifconfig en0 ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
You need to have administrative privileges to change the MAC address, hence it will ask for the password. It is best recommended that you disconnect from the network while changing your MAC address and then again reconnect after successfully changing it. Also, make a note of your default hardware MAC address. Some the MAC use Wi-Fi instead of ether in the above command. if you meet any problem try to use Wi-Fi. Remove the xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx with your MAC address generated or you have in mind. And also replace en0 with any other interface name that you are using. If you don’t know the interface name, you should check it from the above mentioned steps. To confirm that it has been changed you could use any of the above mentioned way. If you are changing your MAC address to get privacy you better generate random MAC address.
After changing the MAC address on your OS X or sierra or yosemite or el capitan it might be possible that you meet network issues, in that case make sure you turn off and then turn on your network device. You can use the method and get around with any blocking. It sounded a very difficult task at the beginning, but even you can see how easy it was. Let me know, how did it go for you?
MAC address filtering is one of those controversial features that some people swear by, whereas others say it’s a complete waste of time and resources. So which is it? In my opinion, it’s both, depending on what you are trying to accomplish by using it.
Unfortunately, this feature is marketed as a security enhancement that you can use if you are technically-savvy and willing to put in the effort. The real fact of the matter is that it really provides no extra security and can actually make your WiFi network less secure! Don’t worry, I’ll explain more about that below.
However, it’s not completely useless. There are some legitimate cases where you can use MAC address filtering on your network, but it won’t add additional security. Instead, it’s more of an administration tool that you can use to control whether or not your kids can access the Internet at certain times during the day or if you want to manually add devices to your network, which you can monitor.
Why It Doesn’t Make Your Network More Secure
The main reason why it doesn’t make your network more secure is because it’s really easy to spoof a MAC address. A network hacker, which can literally be anyone since the tools are so easy to use, can easily figure out the MAC addresses on your network and then spoof that address onto their computer.
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So, you may ask, how can they get your MAC address if they can’t connect to your network? Well, that’s an inherent weakness with WiFi. Even with a WPA2 encrypted network, the MAC addresses on those packets are not encrypted. This means that anyone with network sniffing software installed and a wireless card in range of your network, can easily grab all the MAC addresses that are communicating with your router.
They can’t see the data or anything like that, but they don’t really have to break the encryption to access your network. Why? Because now that they have your MAC address, they can spoof it and then send out special packets to your router called disassociation packets, which will disconnect your device from the wireless network.
Then, the hackers’ device will try to connect to the router and will be accepted because it is now using your valid MAC address. This is why I said earlier that this feature can make your network less secure because now the hacker doesn’t have to bother trying to crack your WPA2 encrypted password at all! They simply have to pretend to be a trusted computer.
Again, this can be done by someone who little to no knowledge of computers. If you just Google crack WiFi using Kali Linux, you’ll get tons of tutorials on how to hack into your neighbor’s WiFi within a few minutes. So do those tools always work?
The Best Way to Stay Secure
Those tools will work, but not if you are using WPA2 encryption along with a fairly long WiFi password. It’s really important that you don’t use a simple and short WiFi password because all a hacker does when using these tools is a brute force attack.
With a brute force attack, they will capture the encrypted password and try to crack it using the fastest machine and the biggest dictionary of passwords they can find. If your password is secure, it can take years for the password to be cracked. Always try to use WPA2 with AES only. You should avoid the WPA [TKIP] + WPA2 [AES] option as it’s much less secure.
However, if you have MAC address filtering enabled, the hacker can bypass all that trouble and simply grab your MAC address, spoof it, disconnect you or another device on your network from the router and connect freely. Once they are in, they can do all kinds of damage and access everything on your network.
Other Solutions to the Problem
But some people will still say it’s so useful to control who can get on my network, especially since everyone doesn’t know how to use the tools I mentioned above. OK, that’s a point, but a better solution to control outsiders who want to connect to your network is to use a guest WiFi network.
Just about all modern routers have a guest WiFi feature that will allow you to let others connect to your network, but not let them see anything on your home network. If your router doesn’t support it, you can just purchase a cheap router and attach that to your network with a separate password and separate IP address range.
It’s also worth noting that other WiFi security “enhancements” like disabling SSID broadcasting will also make your network LESS secure, not more secure. Another one people have told me they try is to use static IP addressing. Again, as long as a hacker can figure out your network IP range, they can use any address in that range too on their machine, regardless of whether you have assigned that IP or not.
Hopefully, this gives you a clear idea of what you can use MAC addressing filtering for and what expectations to have. If you feel differently, feel free to let us know in the comments. Enjoy!