Mac Tricks

A MAC address is a unique identifier for your network card, and is always unique meaning it often serves as a security measure on many networks. What does Spoofing your MAC address mean? It means you will be able to set your MAC address to whatever you like. How is this possibly useful you may ask? Imagine yourself at a hotel where you can only have one device on the network at once, and you would like to use your wifi on your laptop and on your iPhone. If you setup the wifi with your iPhone and then spoof your laptops MAC address to that of your iPhone, you could use both the devices on the network at once. The applications are limitless.

Okay lets look into how we actually go about spoofing our MAC address.

Retrieving your current MAC address

To retrieve our current MAC address, launch your terminal and execute this command:

ifconfig en1 | grep ether

You will now see something similar to:

ether 00:17:f2:72:42:f2

Write this number down in case you ever want to switch back to it, or you’ll have to reset your computer to go back to it.

Spoofing the MAC address

In terminal type:

sudo ifconfig en1 ether 00:b1:b2:b3:b4:b5

in this case “00:b1:b2:b3:b4:b5″ being your desired MAC address. In the small chance this doesn’t work, try disassociating with your wireless network (but still leaving Airport ON), then running the command and reconnecting.

Test new MAC address

Follow the steps in the Retrieving your current MAC address section, and if it matches what you put in you’re set.