When this happens, the router will allow the hacker’s device to get on the network because it has already given permission to the MAC address they are spoofing. With this technique, they can make your router think that their device is one of your devices. If the hacker is able to obtain the MAC address for any device on the network, they can use something called MAC address spoofing.

One of the key identifiers that the router will use is the unique MAC address for each device. So, when you connect a bunch of devices to the Wi-Fi, the router needs to be able to distinguish each device to route traffic correctly. Moreover, the MAC address for each device is truly unique in the world. That means every phone, computer, tablet, and more has a MAC address for the hardware that allows them to connect to your Wi-Fi. This is a serial number that is encoded into every networking device when the device is manufactured. Routers and networking equipment use several things to identify devices on a network, and one of those things is the MAC address. If your intention is to spoof an address, generating a random MAC address is usually the best bet to avoid any network conflicts.5.2 #2 Collect Data How Can a MAC Address Be Used Against Your Wi-Fi Security? You can also retrieve individual IP addresses and MAC addresses together with the ifconfig command, although the output isn’t nearly as user friendly. Notice that even a wi-fi cards MAC address will be referred to as “Ethernet address” using the networksetup command. This may return something like this, look for the string following “Ethernet Address” to find the MAC address per interface:Įthernet Address: c6:18:ed:fa:ff:15:db:51 To quickly list all MAC addresses of network hardware on a Mac, even if they are currently inactive, launch the Terminal and type the following command: List All Network Hardware MAC Addresses in Mac OS X Note that the wireless MAC address will be labeled as “Wi-Fi Address” in new versions of OS X like Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, anything from Lion and later as well as iPhone and iOS, whereas it’s called “Airport Address” in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and before. The address is always in the form aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff, looking something like “ce:9e:8d:02:1d:e9” or a variation of. Look at the bottom of the window for “Wi-Fi Address”, the hexadecimal characters next to this are the machines MAC address.Select your currently active network connection from the left menu (Wi-Fi, Ethernet, etc) and then click on “Advanced” in the lower right corner.Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu.To quickly find a MAC address on a Mac with OS X, do the following:

Mac address search