Sniffing & Spoofingmacspoofingnetworkprivacyvendor

MAC Changer

Utility for manipulating the MAC address of network interfaces. Makes changing MAC addresses easier to thwart tracking by marketing firms and agencies.

Description

GNU MAC Changer is a utility that simplifies the manipulation of MAC addresses on network interfaces. MAC addresses are unique identifiers on networks that can be changed on most hardware, though they only need to be unique. They have been abused by unscrupulous marketing firms, government agencies, and others to track computers across multiple networks.

By regularly changing the MAC address, this kind of tracking can be thwarted or made much more difficult. The tool provides features to set specific MAC addresses, random MACs, MACs from other vendors, same vendor MACs, or same kind MACs (e.g., wireless card), and displays a vendor MAC list with 6200 items.

It is useful for privacy protection and evading network-based identification.

How It Works

MAC Changer interacts with network interfaces to read, modify, or reset the MAC address at the hardware level. It can generate random MACs, match vendor prefixes from its database of 6200 vendors, preserve ending bytes with -e, or restore the permanent hardware MAC. Changes apply to the specified device, leveraging Linux network configuration to spoof the address.

Installation

bash

sudo apt install macchanger

Flags

-h, --helpPrint this help

-V, --versionPrint version and exit

-s, --showPrint the MAC address and exit

-e, --endingDon't change the vendor bytes

-a, --anotherSet random vendor MAC of the same kind

-ASet random vendor MAC of any kind

-p, --permanentReset to original, permanent hardware MAC

-r, --randomSet fully random MAC

Examples

Print the help message for macchanger

macchanger -h

Print the version and exit

macchanger -V

Show the current MAC address of wlan0 interface

macchanger -s wlan0

Set a fully random MAC address on eth0

macchanger -r eth0

Set random vendor MAC of the same kind on wlan0

macchanger -a wlan0

Set random vendor MAC of any kind on eth0

macchanger -A eth0

Reset eth0 to original permanent hardware MAC

macchanger -p eth0

Updated 2026-04-16kali.org ↗