What is mac address?
A MAC address (media access control address) is a unique identifier assigned to network interfaces for communications on the physical network segment.
Every computer device have different MAC address. The MAC address is a built-in every computer device when it is created. When computer starts, operation system reads from hardware device. When you are connected to the wireless network, it sends packets to you and then your computer converts these information to websites, movies, images… Imagine that two computers are connected to the wireless network, first computer wants website google.com, and the second computer wants amazon.com, network sends packets to these computers, but how do these computers know what packets ignore and what packets to recive?
Computers identify packets to recive or ignore by MAC address, when the network is sending packet to computer, it also writes in packet the MAC address of the computer it is sending.
that is the way how wireless networks and computers are connecting each other.
So, if you do not change your ip and hack someones wireless network, you let them to investigate your identify by analysing network history.
How to hide MAC address?
You may think that how you can change MAC address if computer reads it from hardware? You are not going to make modification on hardware, you going to change RAM. When the computer starts, MAC address loads in RAM and we going to change already loaded MAC address..
So, when you change your MAC address police will find your fake MAC address and they will not be able to trace hacker. Now you have basic
information about what is MAC address, dangers of hacking without changing MAC address, how police can trace you, how we can change it.
Change MAC address by Kali
Kali has already installed program called “macchanger” which lets us to changeloaded MAC address in RAM. Open VirtualBox, start kali virtual machine and open terminal. We need to stop our wireless card to change the MAC address. Type in “ifconfig wlan0 down”. The ifconfig is a program,wlan0 is our wireless card and the down is action what we want to do. So,this command will stop every wireless service and it is nessesary to stop network card before changing the MAC address. Then type in the following command “macchanger --help”.This command tells Kali to call macchanger and show help. There is program usage instructions. In my case, I will use random MAC address by entering “macchanger –random wlan0”.macchanger is program name –random is an option and wlan0 is wireless card. If everything is correct the screen should look like this:
It shows you what was the permanent (built-in in network card) MAC address and its corporation in brackets, and down it shows that there is a new MAC address which does not have corporation. So, now we already changed the mac address and we need to hack into anyones network. But you are not ready for that now, because you do not know what is monitor mode and how to use it. In the next chapter you will learn what monitor mode is and how to use it with Kali.