It’s really important that you don’t use a simple and short WiFi password because all a hacker does when using these tools is a brute force attack. Those tools will work, but not if you are using WPA2 encryption along with a fairly long WiFi password. So do those tools always work? The Best Way to Stay Secure If you just Google crack WiFi using Kali Linux, you’ll get tons of tutorials on how to hack into your neighbor’s WiFi within a few minutes. This is why I said earlier that this feature can make your network less secure because now the hacker doesn’t have to bother trying to crack your WPA2 encrypted password at all! They simply have to pretend to be a trusted computer.Īgain, this can be done by someone who little to no knowledge of computers. Then, the hackers’ device will try to connect to the router and will be accepted because it is now using your valid MAC address. Why? Because now that they have your MAC address, they can spoof it and then send out special packets to your router called disassociation packets, which will disconnect your device from the wireless network. They can’t see the data or anything like that, but they don’t really have to break the encryption to access your network. This means that anyone with network sniffing software installed and a wireless card in range of your network, can easily grab all the MAC addresses that are communicating with your router.

Even with a WPA2 encrypted network, the MAC addresses on those packets are not encrypted. So, you may ask, how can they get your MAC address if they can’t connect to your network? Well, that’s an inherent weakness with WiFi. A network hacker, which can literally be anyone since the tools are so easy to use, can easily figure out the MAC addresses on your network and then spoof that address onto their computer. The main reason why it doesn’t make your network more secure is because it’s really easy to spoof a MAC address. Why It Doesn’t Make Your Network More Secure Instead, it’s more of an administration tool that you can use to control whether or not your kids can access the Internet at certain times during the day or if you want to manually add devices to your network, which you can monitor. There are some legitimate cases where you can use MAC address filtering on your network, but it won’t add additional security.

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