If you consider yourself a bit of geek then you must have heard of Media Access Control (MAC) address, often known as Ethernet hardware address (EHA), hardware address or physical address of the system. These MAC addresses are inbuilt and stored in network interface card (NIC) read-only memory of the card, or some other firmware mechanism.

The most common myth about MAC address being that, it cannot be changed without changing the network interface card. In today,s post we will talk about some of the tools that can be used to change the MAC address on Windows and Mac.

 Why to change or spoof MAC address

The most important reason for anyone to change his MAC address is Privacy and security. As MAC address of the system is visible to everyone on the local Ethernet network or Wireless network and can be found out by anyone using simple tools or few DOS commands. You can be easily monitored using your MAC address. Apart from this, there are other reasons like bypassing restrictions on your network if your network administrator has placed some restrictions based on MAC address.

Technitium MAC Address Changer

It is a free tool and can very easily change or spoof Media Access Control (MAC) address of your Network or Ethernet Card irrespective of the manufacturer. It sets a new MAC address bypassing the hard coded default MAC address that came with the device.

MAC Address Changer

If you are wondering about how the MAC address is changed with the help of this tool, this tool just changes a registry value in the Windows registry.  Windows uses the registry value as MAC address instead of the hard coded one. The MAC address provided by the NIC card is only used when the registry value is not present. These days few Network Adapter drivers come with this as an inbuilt feature.

You can download the free tool here.

On Mac OS X using SpoofMac

You need to apply the following commands as superuser to change the MAC address of computer’s ethernet card.

sudo ifconfig en0 lladdr 00:01:02:03:04:05

or

sudo ifconfig en0 ether 00:01:02:03:04:05

If you are not comfortable using superuser commands, then you can try the free Mac tool SpoofMac which is basically a Python script that lets you change your MAC address in one command.