Hunter Thompson

Hi Everyone,

I am trying to figure wireless security - my brother has an AP in his room and I am trying to get access to it from my laptop. Please note I am a total newb when it comes to security stuff and we are trying to learn about it by finding holes.

He setup as an unsecured AP at first, and I bought a Netgear WG511v2 card for my laptop which enabled me to connect to the internet through his ap with no problem - in fact, my laptop would just "get connected" by itself - it found the ap and got assigned an IP address automatically and hey presto - I'm surfin the net!

So he did some research to try and secure the connection a bit more, I asked for him to try and do it little by little so we can get past each bit of security one bit at a time. He has now done something to his AP so that I am not being issued an IP address. His SSID is still "default" and there is no encryption enabled.

So now I am trying to get back online through his AP. I have been reading up on what may have caused me to no longer have access and I am assuming he has looked in the ARP table, seen my MAC address accessing his network (I did not spoof my MAC) and somehow made a filter on his ap to only allow his MAC addresses. When I grill him if this is the deal he says "no" to everything else but gets shifty when I bring up MAC filtering- ha, I'm on to you.

So I researched up on MAC addresses, figured out one can "spoof" a MAC address and got myself "Mac Makeup"; I changed my Netgear Wireless Card Mac Address but, still no IP address being issued...

Am I on the right path? A few forum posts I have read state that Mac address filtering is "the weakest protection" you can use on WAP's, but I must be missing something - how does one figure out what valid MAC addresses are allowed? "Mac Makeup" seems to have the option to randomly generate a MAC address or nominate a specific one, but I can't seem to understand how one would know this information. The only thing I could guess would work would be some kind of sniffer that could see someone else's traffic and clone the MAC address of their machine?

I have been trying to find information, forums, faq's and tutorials to help me get through this next step but have to ask for some assistance or direction to some information that might help out. Once I get through my bro's MAC filtering test I think he will try WEP, which seems to have a fair bit of info out there on. But this MAC address thing has me stumped, and everyone says it is the easiest to get past! I suck.

Hey thanks for any information.
Hunter