How to Spoof MAC Address on Android Phones [Rooted]

Spoofing MAC Address on Android Devices

Even though MAC address is embedded on the hardware device during manufacture, it can still be spoofed to input a new one of your choice. Here is a detailed instruction on how to spoof MAC address on your Android phone.

Before you spoof the MAC address, you need to record the original/current MAC address of your device which can be done according to the instruction below:

• On the Home Screen of your phone, tap Menu button and go to Settings.
• Tap About Device and go to Status
• Now scroll down to record the 12-digit code shown under Wi-Fi Mac address. An address would read something like:
  Example MAC address: E5:12:D8:E5:69:97

Requirements for Spoofing the MAC Address

1. Rooted Android Phone
2. BusyBox app installed on your phone
3. Once BusyBox is installed, you need to install Terminal app

Once the above requirements are satisfied, follow the instructions below to spoof your MAC address:

Open the Terminal app and type the commands as listed below:

$ su [HIT ENTER]

$ busybox iplink show eth0 [HIT ENTER]

(This will show your current MAC address, just for your confirmation)

Now, type the following command:

$ busybox ifconfig eth0 hw ether XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX [HIT ENTER]

(In the above command, replace XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX with your new MAC address)

You have now spoofed your MAC address successfully. To check for the change enter the following command again:

$ busybox iplink show eth0 [HIT ENTER]

(Now you should see your new MAC address)

Change or Spoof a MAC Address in Windows or OS X

Change Windows MAC Address

You can change the MAC address for the network card in Windows pretty easily following the steps below.

Step 1: Click on Start, then Control Panel, then Network Connections, and right-click on the network connection you want to change the MAC address for and select Properties. It will normally either be Local Area Connection or Wireless Network Connection.

 

If you are using Windows Vista, Windows 7 or higher, you have to go to Control Panel, then Network and Internet, then Network and Sharing Center, and then click on Manage Network Connections or Change adapter settings.


Then you can right-click on the adapter and choose Properties.
Step 2: On the General or Networking tab, click the Configure button.

 

Step 3: Now click on the Advanced tab and click on the Locally Administered Address property or the Network Address property.

 

By default, the Not Present value is selected. Go ahead and click on the Value radio button and enter in a new MAC address. The MAC address is a combination of 6 pairs of numbers and characters, i.e. 40-A2-D9-82-9F-F2. You should enter the MAC address without the dashes.

 

You can go to the command prompt and type in IPCONFIG /ALL to check that the MAC address has been changed. Go ahead and restart the computer in order for the changes to take effect.
This is the simplest way to change your MAC address in Windows. You can also do so via the registry, but it’s much more technical and probably not required by most people.

 

Change OS X MAC Address

Changing the MAC address on OS X is definitely not as easy as it is on Windows. Firstly, you have to use Terminal (similar to command prompt in Windows) to actually change the MAC address.
Secondly, you need to manually figure out the technical name of the adapter before you can change the settings. I’ll explain everything below step by step, but it gets a bit complicated at times.

Step 1: To start, let’s find out the current MAC address for your Mac. You can do this in one of two ways: via System Preferences or via Terminal. Open System Preferences, click on Network and then click on the Advanced button. Make sure to select the appropriate interface first (WiFi, Ethernet, etc) in the listbox on the left.


Step 2: Click on the Hardware tab and you will see the first line is MAC Address. I thought you could simply choose Manually from the Configure dropdown, but that doesn’t allow you to edit the MAC address.


Step 3: In Terminal, you can get the MAC address by typing in the following command:

ifconfig en0 | grep ether

Step 4: This will give you the MAC address for the en0 interface. Depending on how many interfaces you have on your computer, you might need to run this command several times adding 1 to the number each time. For example, I ran the following commands below until I reached an interface that didn’t exist.


Step 5: Now you can simply compare the MAC addresses listed here with the one you saw via System Preferences. In my case, my WiFi MAC address of f8:1e:df:d8:9d:8a matches with en1, so that is the interface I have to use for the next commands.
Before we change the MAC address, you can use a useful command in Terminal to generate a random MAC address if you need one.

openssl rand -hex 6 | sed ‘s/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//’

Step 6: Now that you have a new MAC address, you can change the current one using the following command below. Replace XX with the actual MAC address you want to use.

sudo ifconfig en0 ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

Step 7: In order to do this, you need to be logged in as an Administrator or you have to enable the root account in OS X. By default, root is disabled and it’s better to leave it disabled if you can. Just login as an admin and you should be able to run the command just fine. It will ask you for your password, though, before changing the MAC address.
Also, the address won’t change if you are still connected to a WiFi network. You need to first disconnect from any networks and then run the command. Surprisingly, disconnecting from a wireless network in OS X is not intuitive at all. You have to press and hold the Option key and then click on the WiFi icon to see the disconnect option.


So here is a rundown of all the commands I ran in order to get the current MAC address, generate a random one, update the MAC address and then verify to make sure it had actually changed.


As I mentioned earlier, this is definitely not as straightforward as the process is on Windows, but you should be able to do it if you simply copy and paste the commands above. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment. Enjoy!