New cyberattacks and breaches appear in our news feeds every day, targeting individuals as well as large corporations. Hackers have many techniques to exploit unsuspecting victims, but one of the most common is called MAC spoofing. This is when a device changes its MAC address to match the MAC of another network device, which can be used to bypass security measures and attack the victim.
To perform a MAC spoofing attack, the attacker sends out a broadcast ARP request that tells other devices on the network what IP address to use when sending packets. This message is typically sent from the attacker's device, which means that it can pass through the victim's firewall without detection. The attacker can also target a specific device by spoofing its MAC address to match the MAC address of a particular network card or other hardware component.
Aside from enabling a device to connect to networks that it would otherwise not be able to access, MAC spoofing can be used to carry out other types of attacks against vulnerable devices. These include network eavesdropping (by mimicking the MAC address of a trusted device to monitor traffic), bypassing authentication by spoofing a device's MAC address, and launching Man-in-the-Middle attacks (by intercepting communication between two devices and altering or stealing data).
To spoof your own MAC address, you need a computer with admin rights that is connected to the same wireless network as the device you want to attack. You can then run a command line tool like gnumacchanger on Linux or macOS to change your physical MAC address, or on Windows, you can use the getmac command line utility.
