Change Your Big MAC into a Whopper
Changing your
computers
NIC MAC
address is dicey businessChanging your computers NIC MAC address is dicey business. It’s not something that you need to do everyday, every week, every month…you get the idea. However, when you need to do it…god damn, you need to do it.
Relying on the manufacturer to have built in a MAC address changer is problematic usually unless you have a higher end NIC like HP’s. Even then, it’s usually a pain in the neck to try and find the control panel or settings that you have to change to get a new MAC address.
Even if you do manage to use the utility, there is always the gotcha that you can only change a few numbers of it and not the manufacturer ID part of the address.
I can’t think of too many legitimate uses for this program but one use springs to mind and I wish I had it for this instance. Years ago, a software manufacturer went out of business but tied it’s software licensing to a MAC address on one of my servers. I could still use the software but when I tried to upgrade to a new server, or a virtual server, the new machine, of course, had all new MAC addresses.
Software stopped working.
After a few days of tooling around the Internet, I finally found a way to “spoof” the MAC address but a utility like MAC Makeup would have saved me considerable trouble.
It’s actually two years later and I still use that software with it’s fucked up licensing and still spoof the MAC address, so having this utility in my toolbelt will make things easier moving forward.
If you can think of some more legitimate uses for this cools piece of programming, please leave them in the dofollow comments below.
Finally, unless you know what you are doing, don’t play around with lower level OSI stuff like this.
Rarst ran a little review of the MAC address changing software program Mac MakeUp today. If you have not checked out his website you might wanna do so as he constantly covers interesting tools and services there. Back to the software program. Mac MakeUp is a portable software for the Windows operating system that can change the Mac address of a network adapter. The Mac address can be described as a parameter that can be used to identify network adapters. You might have heard about them in the context of wireless networks and Mac address spoofing.
Mac Address Changer
Most of the time you have no reason to touch MAC address or even know it exist. However there are two scenarios that call for manual changes:
- Hardware must be changed while preserving MAC address. Typical example is Internet providers locking access to specific hardware. Routers can usually change MAC address natively but changing it on PCs is not that easy.
- MAC address must be changed because it is causing problems. I had once experienced setting up room of new PCs that all had MACs of all zeroes in their network cards. Network was hardly working till those were changed.
Combo number (1) contains the list of the adapters you can select. The total number is shown in the last line of the log window (2). The adapter selected is the first PCI adapter in your system; the numbers after the name tell you the driver version.
If there is a “new” (spoofed) MAC for the adapter, it is shown in box number (3), and if it has a known OID the corrisponding manufacturer is show in box (4).
You can go back to your original MAC address by pressing Remove at this moment.
You can spoof the address by typing the new one into the box (3), or selecting a manufacturer from box (4). This creates a new MAC with the chosen OID and “123456” as device ID. Of course, you can change the device ID as you like.
Now just press Change and check the log for any errors. After disabling/enabling the adapter, your new MAC is in place.
That’s all!
Also, if you start typing an OID into the box (3), there is an automatic lookup function that tells you what manufacturer you are referring to. Starting from version 1.91d Mac Makeup look for an installation of Wireshark: if you have it, the program will use tha OID database that ships with that tool. Authors of Wireshark made a great job with the sniffer and continuously update their manufacturers signature database. Also if you don’t know Wireshark you’re missing a very good network analyzer.
New from version 1.23d is the ability to filter out virtual interfaces. The filter is on by default, but you can disable it by clearing the check (5). Virtual interfaces are referread as the ones not being physical. From version 1.83d the filtering engine was revised to be more accurate and support different types of cards. Also the bus to which they are attached to is displayed.
If you check MAC History (8) the program looks for a file named mmkup.ini. This file contains the history of MAC addresses used on a per interface basis: this way you can use the combo box (3) to cycle through spoofed addresses. The file is located into the same directory of the main executable.
If you need to save the log window or clear it, just right-click on (2)
and select the proper action from the popup menu.Auto nic off/on (9) is new from version 1.83d and lets you disable and then reenable the network interface when you spoof its address. This way the change is immediate, no more need to open network connections applet or use external tools. The ‘Cycle interface now’ just disables/reenables the interface when you press it.
If you press (10) you have this menu that lets you generate a completely random mac address, a random device ID (mantaining the OID), or a new OID (mantaining device ID) taken from the database or autogenerated.
Mac MakeUp – MAC Address spoofing tool
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