MAC Address

It stands for Media Access Control and is permanent, physical and unique address assigned to network device by the manufacturer.
It is used within the network to identify devices and transfer data between devices.

Why change the MAC address¶

Increase anonymity
Impersonate other devices
Bypass filters

How to change MAC address¶

Use ifconfig to get the details of the devices connected. It will show some common devices connected like eth0, lo and if wireless adapter is connected it will show wlan0. Suppose we want to change the MAC address of the wireless adapter connected. The details would be something like, (ether here is the MAC address we want to change.)

wlan0: flags=4099<UP,BROADCAST,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        ether 70:89:8f:23:08:y6  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

Use the following command to disable the device before changing the MAC address. (Also see Permission Error)
```
ifconfig wlan0 down
```
Now we use the following command to set the new address for the interface(wlan0)
```
ifconfig wlan0 hw wlan0 ether 00:11:22:33:44:55
```
Enable the device back up.
```
ifconfig wlan0 up
```
This MAC address won't be permanent as will revert back to original after a reboot because the above process only changes the MAC address in the memory and not the physical address. If the MAC address is getting changed even without a reboot then follow the below steps.(Youtube tutorial)
Use any text editor like Vim and edit the following file, `vim /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

Append the config file with the following text.

[device] 
wifi.scan-rand-mac-address=no 

[connection] 
ethernet.cloned-mac-address=preserve 
wifi.cloned-mac-address=preserve

Restart the network service or restart the virtual box.

service network-manager restart # OR 
service networking restart