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.

MAC addresses have long been used as the singularly unique layer 2 network identifier in LANs. Through controlled, organizationally unique identifiers (OUI) allocated to hardware manufacturers, MAC addresses are globally unique for all LAN-based devices in use today. Your Media Access Control address, or MAC address, is a unique 12-character code (for example 00:00:00:00:00:0X) that your device uses to identify itself when connecting to a network. When you register it on My WiFi, your device will automatically connect to the TWCWiFi network when in range. How do I locate my WiFi (MAC) Address?

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.

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Other Solutions to the Problem

But some people will still say it’s so useful to control who can get on my network, especially since everyone doesn’t know how to use the tools I mentioned above. OK, that’s a point, but a better solution to control outsiders who want to connect to your network is to use a guest WiFi network.

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.

It’s also worth noting that other WiFi security “enhancements” like disabling SSID broadcasting will also make your network LESS secure, not more secure. Another one people have told me they try is to use static IP addressing. Again, as long as a hacker can figure out your network IP range, they can use any address in that range too on their machine, regardless of whether you have assigned that IP or not.

Lookup Mac Address On Network

Hopefully, this gives you a clear idea of what you can use MAC addressing filtering for and what expectations to have. If you feel differently, feel free to let us know in the comments. Enjoy!

Submit a Wi-Fi Access Point

Skyhook uses Wi-Fi access point details to help provide location to apps and devices, especially in dense urban areas or indoors.

If you’re getting incorrect location results, filling out the form below could resolve this issue. Submitting the form will update your Wi-Fi access point information in the Skyhook database.

We’ll need your Wi-Fi’s MAC address and it’s location, however the MAC address of your Wi-Fi access point is not always simple to locate. Often, one or more MAC addresses will be printed on your access point, but please be aware that these are NOT the required MAC addresses. To learn what a MAC address is and how to get it, see our tutorial below.

You should receive an email confirming the data that you sent after submitting the form. If you don't receive a confirmation email, or the data you submitted doesn’t look right, please get in touch with any questions and we’ll be glad to help.

Note: Skyhook processes user submitted data immediately. For most devices, this means you should see the difference in your location right away. If you are updating the location of an access point already in our system, it may take up to 7 days for the new location to take effect on the device or app. Depending on how often our partners check our database, data entered here can take up to 7 days to be included in their results.

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