Can We Hack Wifi Using Mac Address

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Jan 05, 2017 Hack WiFi using WifiSlax 4.11 in Mac OS X and Windows. By utilizing a Bootable USB, we can boot WifiSlax on both Mac or Windows PC. At for Mac, after press, the Power catch, simply continue holding the Option key to go to the Boot menu.
Sep 09, 2014 Step. 6 Now open app, in the terminal, type “ IP link show” to see a list of interfaces. Identify the one that has your MAC address — for this example, we’ll use the eth0 interface. In the terminal emulator, enter “IP link set eth0 address XX: XX: XX: XX: XX: XX” and “ ip link set eth0 broadcast XX: XX: XX: XX: XX: XX“, where eth0 is the interface you identified and XX: XX: XX.

Every day we see news about computers being hacked and how the cybercriminals make money off people clueless about the protection of their assets.

The parameters are the SSID of the network authenticator, Nounce (ANounce), supplicant Nounce (SNounce), authenticator MAC address (access point MAC), and suppliant MAC address (WiFi client MAC). From a hacker’s perspective, we can use a brute force or dictionary attack or rainbow tables to crack a WPA/WPA2 network, obviously a dictionary.

For someone not very technical, it may sound as if hackers are so powerful, and the only way to hide is to shut down all devices and go off the grid completely.

However, the truth is that there are several simple things one can do to make sure that we are reasonably safe when browsing the internet without affecting our ability to access the information we need.

Whether or not someone can hack into the computer or phone through WiFi depends on a person’s proximity to the WiFi router. If a cybercriminal in the range of access to the WiFi router, they can connect to the local network and perform various attacks, such as Man In The Middle attack.

If the hacker is outside of the WiFi range, then the way they attack will be different.

Let’s consider various scenarios of how the computer can be hacked and ways to protect your devices.

Hacking Computer Through Local WiFi

As you probably guessed, it is much easier to hack the computer, which is in close proximity to the hacker’s device.

For instance, your neighbor can connect to your WiFi and use your internet for free. Or you may connect to the free WiFi in the cafe or hotel, but someone already hacked the network, and now everyone, including you, is a potential target.

Or maybe you are using the office WiFi, and it was also hacked.

And it doesn’t have to be a computer, such as a Mac or PC. Your smartphone, iPhone, or Android, which uses the WiFi can be hacked as well.

Let’s see what hackers can do if they are physically connected to the WiFi you are using.

Man in the middle attack

If you have the internet at home from a cable, DSL, or fiber-optic provider, you have a router. Your computer does not directly connect to the internet; it sends and receives data by directing it through the router.

In layman terms, the process is the following:

Your computer or phone finds a WiFi router.
After submitting the correct password, the router sends back its MAC address. MAC address is an identifier of computer components, and in theory, it should be unique across billions of devices on the planet. The network card on your computer also has a unique MAC address.
After you get the MAC address of the router, all internet activity will be going through the router. In the pic below, there is a MAC address next to each device on the local network, and the router’s address is 11:22:33:44:55:66.

When a hacker connects to the local WiFi router, it also finds the MAC address of the router. The hacker changes his computer’s MAC address to be the same as routers one (11:22:33:44:55:66 in the pic below).

Now, all devices on the local network connect to the hacker’s machine, and then the data flows to and from the router. So the hacker becomes a man in the middle (MITM).

Once this happened, the hacker can read all outgoing requests and incoming data using various tools that collect such data.

This means every time you enter a username and password on some web site or enter your credit card number, and it gets saved on the hacker’s machine. Also, every URL you are visiting also gets saved.

There are some limitations, obviously. For instance, if the website uses the HTTPS protocol (S at the end stands for Secure), all traffic is encrypted between your computer and cybercriminals will not be able to crack it (in most cases).

However, if the web site uses HTTP, all data, including the password, is in cleartext.

So, if you want to avoid your data being stolen, always check that web site is using a secure protocol (HTTPS). In the browsers, the secure protocol is usually displayed with a padlock icon next to the URL.

Never enter passwords or financial information on web sites with HTTP!

How the router can be hacked

When it comes to your home WiFi, there are three ways for someone outside to connect to the router:

The router is not password protected
You tell the password. For instance, you told the guest the password, or she looked it up on the router (if you didn’t change the default one)
If the router is using an old authentication protocol

I am going to skip the first two and instead of focus on the last one. The authentication protocol used in with WiFi router is very important.

If your router is old, it is possible that it’s still using WEP protocol, then you should know that anyone who knows a little bit about hacking can hack the router literally in less than a minute.

So, if you have it enabled on your router, then go ahead and disable as I did.

What you should have is WPA2 with AES encryption. In the pic below, the authentication strength (protection from hacking) increases from top to bottom (WPA is less secure, and WPA2-PSK with AES is the most secure).

Some hackers employ a dictionary attack to crack WPA protocol, but it takes supercomputers to hack it. So as long as you are not a celebrity or a billionaire, nobody will spend so many resources to break into your network.

Usually, you can connect to the home router settings by going to the local IP address, such as http://192.168.0.1/.

How to tell if someone hacked your router

One of the sure routers hacked signs is the existence of an unknown device connected to the local WiFi network.

As I explained above, in order to perform a man in the middle (MITM) attack, the hacker must connect to the WiFI network first. And if he’s connected, you can see him too.

One way to find out the connected devices is through the router settings. Some routers allow us to see all connected devices and kick them out if needed.

Another way is to use a network scanner app. For instance, I found a cool app called Fing. The app is available for almost all platforms: iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows.

It is free (with ads) and doesn’t even require creating an account in order to use it.

One cool feature they have is scanning for open ports.

For instance, when I scanned my MacBook Pro, I found that remote desktop and screen sharing features were enabled, and anyone could connect to my Mac remotely.

How to protect from a MITM attack

While it is possible to scan and find unknown devices on the home network, this approach will not work with public WiFi networks, such as the one in Starbucks or the hotel.

You would never know if the public network was compromised. In this case, the only way to protect your privacy is to use a VPN (a virtual private network).

When connected to VPN, your computer or phone creates a secure encrypted channel with the VPN server. After the connection is established, all requests go to the VPN server. The server makes all requests on your behalf and returns the results back to you.

From outside, it looks like the computer is sending some garbage to and back to the same computer. Even if the hacker collecting the information, he won’t be able to tell whether you’re connecting to Google.com or MacMyths.com.

When choosing a VPN software, follow these best practices:

Do not use a free VPN. They have significant limitations, and you know that good things are never free.
Test for speed. Some VPS are significantly faster than others.
Check the provider’s reputation. Since all requests now go through the VPN, technically, the VPN server becomes a man in the middle. So choose only reputable providers.

Personally, I am using NordVPN: it’s the fastest on the market and very inexpensive. It is available for multiple platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.

If you use my NordVPN affiliate link you get a pretty steep discount for three-year plan for up to 6 devices.

Hacking Computer Remotely

We discussed ways to hack the computers and phones through local WiFi, but I know the question that most people ask is whether hackers can connect to the home network when they are on the other end of the world (or more than a hundred yards or meters away).

Fortunately, the answer is no, someone cannot get into your home network, even if they know the password if they are outside of the range (more than 300 feet).

Also, in most cases, hackers cannot get into your computer is off (link).

Wifi Mac Address

However, there are other ways to get into your system remotely. Do you remember a story of Bezos’s personal data being leaked?

In his case, he received a message on WhatsApp with malware attachment. When the malware was installed on his phone, it started sending the personal data to the server abroad.

Similarly, we are all at the risk of having malware installed on our computers and smartphones. Some malware open access to the device, so the hackers can access it remotely.

Or, the malware could be a keylogger, and in this case, even having HTTPS or a VPN will not help. A keylogger will record the keys pressed on the keyboard, and if it happens to be a credit card number, then the hacker will have it.

So, how to protect the devices from malware? You need to install an antivirus program.

There is a common myth that Macs cannot have viruses, but this is not true. I was able to inject my Mac with more than 100 malware samples when testing various antimalware solution.

You can check the results of my test and recommended antiviruses in my post: Best Malware Detection App for Mac.

Every time my friends and family ask me for a recommended antivirus, I go with Norton 360. It comes with the biggest bang for the buck and provides antimalware and other security features on all platforms. And it also has its own VPN!

Conclusion

We reviewed multiple ways how someone can hack into your phone or computer through WiFi. I also listed ways to prevent this from happening, which I wanted to reiterate.

If you worry about online security, consider investing in the following tools:

VPN software
Antivirus program

Be very cautious when connecting to public WiFi. I’d say if you don’t have VPN installed on a laptop or smartphone don’t use public WiFi, or at least avoid making purchases with a credit card or entering passwords.

If you are interested in the topic of security, there is a great course available on Udemy about ethical hacking. The instructor teaches how to hack computers ethically and most importantly what can you do to prevent from being targeted:

Learn Network Hacking From Scratch (WiFi & Wired)

Also, check my other post:

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MAC address filtering is one of those controversial features that some people swear by, whereas others say it’s a complete waste of time and resources. So which is it? In my opinion, it’s both, depending on what you are trying to accomplish by using it.

Unfortunately, this feature is marketed as a security enhancement that you can use if you are technically-savvy and willing to put in the effort. The real fact of the matter is that it really provides no extra security and can actually make your WiFi network less secure! Don’t worry, I’ll explain more about that below.

However, it’s not completely useless. There are some legitimate cases where you can use MAC address filtering on your network, but it won’t add additional security. Instead, it’s more of an administration tool that you can use to control whether or not your kids can access the Internet at certain times during the day or if you want to manually add devices to your network, which you can monitor.

Why It Doesn’t Make Your Network More Secure

The main reason why it doesn’t make your network more secure is because it’s really easy to spoof a MAC address. A network hacker, which can literally be anyone since the tools are so easy to use, can easily figure out the MAC addresses on your network and then spoof that address onto their computer.

So, you may ask, how can they get your MAC address if they can’t connect to your network? Well, that’s an inherent weakness with WiFi. Even with a WPA2 encrypted network, the MAC addresses on those packets are not encrypted. This means that anyone with network sniffing software installed and a wireless card in range of your network, can easily grab all the MAC addresses that are communicating with your router.

They can’t see the data or anything like that, but they don’t really have to break the encryption to access your network. Why? Because now that they have your MAC address, they can spoof it and then send out special packets to your router called disassociation packets, which will disconnect your device from the wireless network.

Then, the hackers’ device will try to connect to the router and will be accepted because it is now using your valid MAC address. This is why I said earlier that this feature can make your network less secure because now the hacker doesn’t have to bother trying to crack your WPA2 encrypted password at all! They simply have to pretend to be a trusted computer.

Again, this can be done by someone who little to no knowledge of computers. If you just Google crack WiFi using Kali Linux, you’ll get tons of tutorials on how to hack into your neighbor’s WiFi within a few minutes. So do those tools always work?

The Best Way to Stay Secure

Those tools will work, but not if you are using WPA2 encryption along with a fairly long WiFi password. It’s really important that you don’t use a simple and short WiFi password because all a hacker does when using these tools is a brute force attack.

With a brute force attack, they will capture the encrypted password and try to crack it using the fastest machine and the biggest dictionary of passwords they can find. If your password is secure, it can take years for the password to be cracked. Always try to use WPA2 with AES only. You should avoid the WPA [TKIP] + WPA2 [AES] option as it’s much less secure.

However, if you have MAC address filtering enabled, the hacker can bypass all that trouble and simply grab your MAC address, spoof it, disconnect you or another device on your network from the router and connect freely. Once they are in, they can do all kinds of damage and access everything on your network.

Wifi Mac Address Pc

Just about all modern routers have a guest WiFi feature that will allow you to let others connect to your network, but not let them see anything on your home network. If your router doesn’t support it, you can just purchase a cheap router and attach that to your network with a separate password and separate IP address range.