He had not done anything wrong, but the network firewall had blocked him. After some troubleshooting, we determined his MAC address was being blocked by their firewall software as a false positive. A customer had long owned one of our WiFi boosters and one day could no longer get Internet access at his RV park. Hence it is like changing your fingerprint to get unauthorized access at a security checkpoint.īut what if a network operator’s firewall wrongly begins blocking an authorized device and they don’t have the personnel resources to address it? We came across such a case recently. Cloning a MAC address of an authorized device to several other devices to circumvent this limit in our view is a bad thing because it is a violation of the network operator’s rules. Some campgrounds or other public networks will use MAC address filtering to allow users only a certain number of devices on their network. In fact, with the release of iOS 8, Apple began having iPhones randomly assign MAC addresses to networks to keep connection details private (MAC randomization is different from MAC spoofing though).īut what about changing your own MAC ID by yourself? When would you want to do that? Chances are, not very often. The information is generally not used for nefarious purposes, but privacy advocates are nonetheless right to raise concerns. In the last decade, retailers and media companies, among other network operators, have been logging and tracking MAC addresses to identify who people are and what they are doing. If you need to change your fingerprints in order to do something, it probably means you are up to no good.īut it hasn’t been this simple. So when it comes to changing your device’s MAC address, AKA MAC spoofing, it sounds like a bad thing.
Think of it as your networking device’s fingerprint.
Address blocks are assigned by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) to manufacturers. It has nothing to do with Apple computers, it stands for Media Access Control address.Įvery networking device has a unique MAC address burned into it at the factory. Let’s begin by discussing what a MAC address is. In rare cases it may be necessary, which we will discuss further down.Ĭhanging of a MAC address is a controversial topic. As a basic disclaimer, generally we do not recommend changing your device’s MAC address.
0 kommentar(er)
