Change or Spoof a MAC Address in Windows or OS X

3 years ago by Aseem Kishore

Every NIC (Network Interface Card) has a unique MAC address (Media Access
Control). This applies to all types of network cards, including Ethernet cards
and WiFi cards. The MAC Address is a six-byte number or 12-digit hexadecimal
number that is used to uniquely identify a host on a network.

An example of a MAC address is 1F-2E-3D-4C-5B-6A and it falls into the Layer

2 networking protocol of the OSI model. In today’s networks, ARP, or Address
Resolution Protocol converts a MAC address to a Layer 3 protocol address, such
as an IP address. A MAC address can also be called a Physical Address. Read my
post on how to find your MAC address if you don’t know it.

All MAC addresses are hard-coded into a network card and can never be
changed. However, you can change or spoof the MAC address in the operating
system itself using a few simple tricks.

So why would you want to change your MAC address? Well there are many
reasons for this, mostly related to bypassing some kind of MAC address filter
set on a modem, router or firewall. Changing the MAC Address can help you
bypass certain network restrictions by emulating an unrestricted MAC Address
or by spoofing a MAC address that is already authorized.

For example, a WiFi network may allow only authorized computers to connect
to the network and filters out computers based on the MAC address. If you can
sniff out a legitimate MAC address, you can then spoof your MAC address and
gain access to the WiFi network.

Another example is if you have an ISP that allows only a certain number of
computers to connect to the Internet from your home. If you have more
computers that need to connect, you can spoof the MAC address of an
authorized computer and connect from a different computer.

Change Windows MAC Address

You can change the MAC address for the network card in Windows pretty easily
following the steps below.

Step 1: Click on Start, then Control Panel, then Network Connections, and
right-click on the network connection you want to change the MAC address for
and select Properties. It will normally either be Local Area Connection or
Wireless Network Connection.

If you are using Windows Vista, Windows 7 or higher, you have to go to Control
Panel, then Network and Internet, then Network and Sharing Center, and then
click on Manage Network Connections or Change adapter settings.

Then you can right-click on the adapter and choose Properties.

Step 2: On the General or Networking tab, click the Configure button.

Step 3: Now click on the Advanced tab and click on the Locally Administered
Address property or the Network Address property.

By default, the Not Present value is selected. Go ahead and click on the Value
radio button and enter in a new MAC address. The MAC address is a
combination of 6 pairs of numbers and characters, i.e. 40-A2-D9-82-9F-F2.
You should enter the MAC address without the dashes.

You can go to the command prompt and type in IPCONFIG /ALL to check that
the MAC address has been changed. Go ahead and restart the computer in order
for the changes to take effect.

This is the simplest way to change your MAC address in Windows. You can also
do so via the registry, but it’s much more technical and probably not required
by most people.

Change OS X MAC Address

Changing the MAC address on OS X is definitely not as easy as it is on Windows.
Firstly, you have to use Terminal (similar to command prompt in Windows) to
actually change the MAC address.

Secondly, you need to manually figure out the technical name of the adapter
before you can change the settings. I’ll explain everything below step by step,
but it gets a bit complicated at times.

To start, let’s find out the current MAC address for your Mac. You can do this in
one of two ways: via System Preferences or via Terminal. Open System
Preferences, click on Network and then click on the Advanced button. Make
sure to select the appropriate interface first (WiFi, Ethernet, etc) in the listbox
on the left.

Click on the Hardware tab and you will see the first line is MAC Address. I
thought you could simply choose Manually from the Configure dropdown, but
that doesn’t allow you to edit the MAC address.

In Terminal, you can get the MAC address by typing in the following command:

ifconfig en0 | grep ether

This will give you the MAC address for the en0 interface. Depending on how
many interfaces you have on your computer, you might need to run this
command several times adding 1 to the number each time. For example, I ran
the following commands below until I reached an interface that didn’t exist.

Now you can simply compare the MAC addresses listed here with the one you
saw via System Preferences. In my case, my WiFi MAC address of
f8:1e:df:d8:9d:8a matches with en1, so that is the interface I have to use for the
next commands.

Before we change the MAC address, you can use a useful command in Terminal
to generate a random MAC address if you need one.

openssl rand -hex 6 | sed ‘s/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//’

Now that you have a new MAC address, you can change the current one using
the following command below. Replace XX with the actual MAC address you
want to use.

sudo ifconfig en0 ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

In order to do this, you need to be logged in as an Administrator or you have to

enable the root account in OS X. By default, root is disabled and it’s better to
leave it disabled if you can. Just login as an admin and you should be able to run
the command just fine. It will ask you for your password, though, before
changing the MAC address.

Also, the address won’t change if you are still connected to a WiFi network. You
need to first disconnect from any networks and then run the command.
Surprisingly, disconnecting from a wireless network in OS X is not intuitive at
all. You have to press and hold the Option key and then click on the WiFi icon to
see the disconnect option.

So here is a rundown of all the commands I ran in order to get the current MAC
address, generate a random one, update the MAC address and then verify to
make sure it had actually changed.

As I mentioned earlier, this is definitely not as straightforward as the process is

on Windows, but you should be able to do it if you simply copy and paste the
commands above. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment.
Enjoy!

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