Both parents have worked in IT/IS about as long as I've lived, and I have an enthusiastic interest in computing even outside my profession.
I have also written hundreds of articles for TechRepublic.\Īside from directly work-related skills, I'm an ethical theorist and industry analyst with a keen eye toward open source technologies and intellectual property law. I was sad to give it up, but moving to Colorado kinda makes working in a Florida datacenter difficult. I was at one time the datacenter technician for the Wikimedia Foundation, probably the \"coolest\" job I've ever had: major geek points for being the first-ever paid employee of the Wikimedia Foundation. I hold both MS and CompTIA certs and am a graduate of two IT industry trade schools. I'm an IT consultant, developer, and writer. If that doesn’t convince you that MAC filtering does not provide real security, I don’t know what will.
There are, of course, numerous free utilities you can download to make this change for you as well (such as Macshift for MS Windows XP).Īll of these techniques can of course be automated by self-propagating malware, and the creation of the malware can even be automated to some extent by existing malware creation “kits”. The location of that key varies from one MS Windows version to the next, but find that and you can just edit it yourself.
Its resource consumption is almost unmeasurable, and even if it doesn’t keep out any reasonably knowledgeable security crackers willing to spend a few moments gaining access, it does keep out a lot of automated opportunistic attacks that are aiming solely for the absolute lowest-hanging fruit on the security tree. This doesn’t mean MAC filtering is useless.
Anyone who pays any attention to current trends in wireless security at all should know that MAC filtering is less effective than WEP - and that WEP can be cracked almost instantly these days with commonly available tools. MAC address filtering for wireless networking isn’t real “security”.