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

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
