I am going to expose an important topic on hacking knowledge that some of you might know and most of you don’t. When you’re going to hack a computer or server on the Internet, you won’t want your IP address to spill out. That’s because your ISP could easy trace you by two simple information which is the time and IP Address. So you’ll need to use proxy or even chains of proxies to avoid being directly traced by the victim’s firewall. If you think you’re safe hiding behind a proxy server, bad news is most proxy server has logging enabled and your IP address is definitely listed in the log file when you’re connected to it. It is possible that the administrator of the proxy server passes your information to your ISP and you’ll still get caught at the end of the day. Don’t forget, there are still some other important information that can be obtained from an IP Address if a person knows what tools to use. One of it is your network adapter’s MAC address.
Every network card contains a unique code called MAC address that is permanently assigned to it, similarly like every computer requires a unique IP address to be connected to a network. Although these information can be configured to have the same, it would cause conflict and connection problems. To view your network card’s MAC address, just run the command “ipconfig /all” in command prompt and refer to the value of Physical Address.Mar 08, 2014 OS X Mountain Lion- Protect your Mac from malware. About file quarantine in OS X. If you require anti-virus protection Thomas Reed recommends using Dr.Web Light from the App Store. It's free, and since it's from the App Store, it won't destabilize the system. If you prefer one of the better known commercial products, then Thomas recommends. One, you need to change your MAC address so you network will recognize your device and allow it to connect. Two, for malicious purposes you may need to spoof you MAC address so you could gain access to networks or to hide who you really are. Spoofing your MAC address is legal and can be done safely within Windows without any external software.
One thing you should know is the MAC address on your computer’s network card will not get passed out to the Internet so there is no way a website or an Internet server can capture this information. Only your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can detect the MAC address of your modem or router. So basically your ISP is capable of tracking your location by your IP address, time and the MAC address of your modem or router.
In another scenario, some people may still be using WEP encryption for their wireless network because some old devices don’t support WPA. WEP encryption is very weak and can be cracked in less than 5 minutes using BackTrack Linux. Most of the time they’d also enable a second line of defense which is the MAC address filtering to only allow authorized devices to connect to their wireless network but they’re wrong. A hacker can easily find out the authorized MAC address, change their network card’s MAC address to the authorized ones and poison the ARP cache to prevent the owner’s machine from connecting to it. Here’s an example of Belkin Play Max F7D4401 v1 router. It has a MAC Address Filtering feature where you can set up a list of allowed clients and use the wireless connection.
Other than that, some time limited shareware such as Hotspot Shield that uses your MAC address to keep track of the free usage. If the trial period has expired or is pending to reset every month, you can easily bypass this restriction by changing your MAC address. I bet by now you should know the power of spoofing your MAC Address. MAC address can actually be changed directly from Windows but the easiest way is to just a free program called Technitium MAC Address Changer.
To change your MAC address, run the program, click the Random MAC Address button followed by the Change Now! button. The update takes effect immediately without a reboot and stays intact even when you boot up the computer tomorrow. To restore back your original MAC address, click the Restore Original button on Technitium MAC Address Changer program.
Download Technitium MAC Address Changer
To manually change your MAC address in Windows 7 without using a third party software, go to Control Panel > System > Device Manager. Expand Network Adapters and double click on the network card that you want to change the MAC address. Go to Advanced tab and look for Network Address in the Property box. Click on it and you can specify your own value with any random 12 characters of letters and numbers.
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Replyspoofing the MAC randomly every few minutes may be more useful.
ReplyIf you’re behind a router, your ISP only sees the router’s MAC addy. That’s the one you should change.
Regardless, if you have a home broadband connection, you might have a hard time arguing with your ISP since they tie your IP to the modem id.
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MAC Address (Media Access Control) are permanent by design, several mechanisms allow modification, or “spoofing”, of the MAC address that is reported by the operating system. This can be useful for privacy reasons, for instance when connecting to a Wi-Fi Hotspot, or to ensure interoperability. MAC Address is a unique identifier of your computer.
Some internet service providers bind their service to a specific MAC address; if the user then changes their network card or intends to install a router, the service won’t work anymore. Changing the MAC address of the new interface will solve the problem. Similarly, some software licenses are bound to a specific MAC address. Changing the MAC address in this way is not permanent- after a reboot, it will revert to the MAC address physically stored in the card. A MAC address is 48 bits in length.
A MAC address is a physical hardware address assigned to each device that has the capability of connecting to a network. The internet is nothing more than a large network. The MAC address is something that is assigned in the chip on the device and is not something the user can change.
As a MAC address can be changed, it can be unwise to rely on this as a single method of authentication. IEEE 802.1x is an emerging standard better suited to authenticate devices at a low level.
Types of MAC address:
- Unicast address : An address for a specific computer.
- Multicast address : An address for a specific group of computers in network.
- Broadcast address : An address for all computers in network.
To know Your MAC Address go to command prompt by CMD command
After command ipconfig/all .. It will show your Physical Address and that is our MAC Address.
Also you find by typing command getmac /v /fo list and Enter.
You will get the output for each of your NIC adaptor (Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth devices) will be displayed..
How can you Change your MAC Address-
In Windows
> Press the Windows Key + Fn +Pause key and select Device Manager from the list.
Once Device Manager opens, locate your network adapter, right click it and choose Properties.
> Click on Network Adapter and navigate to Advanced tab and select Network Address from the list of Properties.
> Select Value option and enter any 12-character hexadecimal value.
> Click OK to save changes.
> All Done
If you want to reset then just select Not Present radio button. You will get reset to your default MAC Address.
Router
The method to change the MAC address of a router varies with the router. Not all routers have the ability to change their MAC address. The feature is often referred to as “clone MAC address”. This take the MAC address of one of the machine on your network and replaces the router’s existing MAC address with it. Some support the option to manually enter the MAC address.
To Change MAC Address In Linux
To change your MAC address in Linux and all it takes is two easy to script commands:
These two little commands would set your eth0 interface to use the MAC 00:00:00:00:00:01. Just plug in the NIC you want to set and the MAC address you want to use into the commands above and your done. Changing your MAC address is one of those things that is much easier to do in Linux then under Windows.
By IPRoute Command
- First, turn off the Network card using command:
- Next, set the new MAC is using command:
- Finally, turn it on back with command:
- Now, verify new MAC id using command:
- Sample output:
- Alternatively, you can do this using ‘ifconfig’ command as described below.
- All done
To Making Changes Permanent – Surviving a Reboot
In openSUSE and other SUSE-based systems (SUSE enterprise desktopserver, etc.) you can make changes “permanent” across reboots by adding an appropriate entry to the /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-ethN file (ifcfg-eth0 for the first Ethernet interface config file, ifcfg-eth1 – for the second, etc.):
In Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and other similar systems (Fedora, CentOS, etc.) an easy way to make changes “permanent” across reboots is to add an appropriate entry to the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethN file (ifcfg-eth0 for the first Ethernet interface config file, ifcfg-eth1 – for the second, etc.):
Note: in the file is a value HWADDR – This is not the same thing. Use MACADDR for permanent changes.
The HWADDR “directive is useful for machines with multiple NICs to ensure that the interfaces are assigned the correct device names regardless of the configured load order for each NIC’s module. This directive should not be used in conjunction with MACADDR.”
The MACADDR “directive is used to assign a MAC address to an interface, overriding the one assigned to the physical NIC. This directive should not be used in conjunction with HWADDR.”
Upper and lower case letters are accepted when specifying the MAC address, because the network function converts all letters to upper case.
You can test changes without restarting the system by executing:
(WARNING: doing this will break all existing network connections!)
On Debian, Ubuntu, and similar systems, place the following in the appropriate section of /etc/network/interfaces (within an iface stanza, e.g., right after the gateway line) so that the MAC address is set when the network device is started:
References – Centos, Wiki, Windows