How to change MAC address using macchanger on Kali Linux

Objective

The objective is to change or fake an original network card’s hardware MAC address. The following article will show how to change MAC address using macchanger on Kali Linux.

Requirements

Privileged access to you Kali Linux system.

Difficulty

EASY

Conventions

• # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
• $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Instructions

Change to a Random MAC address

First, let’s see how we can use macchanger to change network card’s hardware MAC address to a random address. We can start by investigating our current MAC address of eg eth0 network interface. To do this we execute macchanger with an option -s and an argument eth0.

# macchanger -s eth0

The network interface you are about to change a MAC address on must be turned off prior your MAC address change attempt. Use ifconfig command to turn off your network interface:

# ifconfig eth0 down

If the following error message appears you have most likely failed to turn off your network interface:

ERROR: Can't change MAC: interface up or not permission: Cannot assign requested address

Now, its time to change network card’s hardware MAC address to some random hexadecimal numbers:

# macchanger -r eth0

Bring your network interface up and display your new MAC addres:

# ifconfig eth0 down
# macchanger -s eth0

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Check new MAC address

Your new MAC address will now show while listing network interface using ifconfig command:

Change to a Specific MAC address

The following procedure on Kali Linux can be used to spoof MAC address to a specific string. This can be achieved by use maccachnager‘s -m option:

# ifconfig eth0 down
# macchanger -m 00:d0:70:00:20:69 eth0
# ifconfig eth0 up
# macchanger -s eth0

Use -l option to find a MAC address prefix of a specific hardware vendor:

# macchanger -l