Friday, October 19, 2018

How to change the MAC address of your wireless card in Kali

Why do we need to change MAC address? 

We need to change the MAC address to avoid detection when we are performing pentesting or hacking into a wireless network. When hacking it is important to not leave any trace behind that can identify who you are. For example imagine that you hacked into someone wireless router and did not hide your identity, in a few days they did a network analysis and found your computer information, they can easily trace back to you.

What is a MAC Address?

A MAC address or Media Access Control is an address sometime called a physical address is a unique identifier assigned to the network interface for communications on the physical network segment. Every network card whether it is wired or wireless have different MAC address. The MAC address is built-in every computer device when it is created. The purpose of having a MAC address is for the network to be able to send packets to your computer.

How To Change Your MAC Address?

You may think if a MAC address is read-only then how do you change it without making a modification to the hardware?

Instead of making modification to the hardware we can use software to make changes to what is stored on RAM. When the computer starts, MaC address loads into RAM and we are going to change the MAC that is already loaded into RAM. 

Changing MAC Address on Kali

1. Open a terminal in Kali

2. Type in ifconfig wlan0 down and press Enter

This stops your wireless network card scanning for wireless network

3. Now type in macchanger --random wlan0 and press Enter.

macchanger is a program we are using

--random is an option to tell macchanger to change the MAC address of the current wireless card to a random MAC address.

wlan0 is the wireless network interface 


Once you execute the command you will be able to see a screen like mine above. 

Permanent/Current MAC: This is the built-in network card MAC address of your computer

New MAC: This shows the new random MAC address that I just told macchanger to change to

Now type in ifconfig wlan0 up to put your wireless card back up to begin hacking.

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