Changing Your MAC Address (Wireless) 5
Trick
Hey
This is quite a cool little trick if you are ever using your Airport Wireless card and you need a new MAC address. This address is in the form of 01:d2:14:3f:ef:ff and is used to identify your wireless card. By spoofing and changing your address you can allow access to your network (for example if you get logged out), request a new IP address or do a whole load of other things. Its quite simple to do, it doesn’t yet work for Ethernet so you can’t change your LAN address.
This method is done in Terminal, the first thing to check is what your current MAC address is. This can be useful if you quickly want to revert back or are just plain interested. Type the following:
ifconfig en1 | grep ether
It will then return an address similar to the one mentioned. Now to change your address simply type:
sudo ifconfig en1 ether a1:b2:c3:d4:e5:f6
This will then change your MAC address, you can confirm the change with the original command. You now have a new address which will let your computer get new information or let you into network resources where you have been locked out.
If you want to set your MAC address back to the original one, either restart your computer or follow the command with your original IP address. Pretty simple, I just wished it would work for Ethernet (en0) so I can get a second IP address to test stuff out on.
Where To Next?
5 Responses to “Changing Your MAC Address (Wireless)”
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1
This does not work on my 15″ MBP (Early 2008). Reading around the internet, this seems to be somewhat of a hit and miss method.
Which Mac did you test this on?
Comment By MacTipper on November 28th, at 6:24 pm
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2
Should have mentioned my laptop. Its a MacBook Pro the version before the current one.
Comment By admin on November 28th, at 6:25 pm
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3
Hi.
This does not work on a MacBook Air.
Reason:
The wireless card in the MBA is en0.
You can’t change en0 with the command above. On most apple laptops en0 is ethernet and en1 is wireless network.
So changing en1 worked for me on a macbook plastic.
Anyone knows how to spoof en0 on a Mac?
Cheers
Comment By MBA on November 28th, at 9:25 pm
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4
Nice tip! I’ve been having airport issues all day, gave this a go, and voila, haven’t lost connectivity for almost 5 hours now. Thanks!
Comment By Microtransactions on December 1st, at 1:31 pm
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5
I went on vacation for a week. ” The kid” was left home and got on a ton of chat sites and became banned permanently from most. Unfortunately I share a couple of those sites and tried to resolve this with the admin people( via email ) but ,, no avail. I understand there is a way to get around this IP banning by using a wireless router. ( these sites ban by using IP address.) I have a G5 iMac with a Leopard O/S. Can someone please refer me to the right information/hardware to get back in these sites so that I contact the people i can not get a hold of by any other means , and possibly talking with admin directly , instead of the long drawn out email. I will thank you in advance. ….. ( frustrated father)
Comment By EmEl on June 25th, at 2:24 pm