13 Comments

How to Spoof Your Mac Address in MacOS 10.6 (and Windows) to Take Advantage of the iSpot 4G

August 5, 2010 by in Random with 13 Comments

My buddy Dave Zatz happened to get one of new (and unfortunately locked down) iSpot 4G modems from Clearwire.  Problem is that since the modem is locked down only to accept the MAC address of an iDevice you can’t use it on a laptop or other device – Hardly fair, right?  To fix that its actually easy to switch the MAC address on your MacOS or Windows device to match that of an iOS device.

First of all, you need an iOS MAC address.  You can either use this one ( 00:1D:4F:13:E1:D9 ) or use one that you can easily find in a Google Image search.

For Mac:

  • Launch Terminal from your Applications:Utilities folder.
  • Enter ifconfig en1 | grep ether to find the current MAC address for your wireless network adapter.
  • Make sure your Airport is turned on and input the following into the Terminal window to disassociate from all networks.
  • Type in:

sudo /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/
Versions/Current/Resources/airport -z

  • When asked input your administrative password, do so.
  • Input the following command to change your MAC address:
    sudo ifconfig en1 ether 00:1D:4F:13:E1:D9
  • (or replace 00:1D:4F:13:E1:D9 with an address of your choice)
  • To verify the change has completed successfully input ifconfig en1 | grep ether into the Terminal window.

There you go, your Mac’s MAC address has changed but restarting your computer will revert the MAC address to its default value.

Now for Windows:

All you need to do is download a free program called MACMakeup (download link here) to modify your MAC address.  Easy right?


  • John

    Note that spoofing the MAC address on a Windows 7 box can be tricky if you have an Intel WiFi card. I had to downgrade my drivers from the latest 13.x version to 11.x in order to be able to spoof. Otherwise, it worked like a charm.

  • Kevin

    Where did you find the old 11.x driver?

  • John
  • Jeff

    Doesn’t work for me on Win7.

  • D.J.

    Works like a charm on Windows XP. Anyone know a good place to find an iOS mac address? I used my iPhone’s but that means I can’t connect my iPhone and laptop at the same time.

  • ddorato

    Dude, Click on the Google Image Search link I provided….

  • D.J.

    lol. ah yes very nice. reading (not scanning) is good. :)

    thx!

  • Anon

    Hacking the iSpot is actually much easier than changing the MAC address.

    1) select the iSpot network
    2) in your browser window, type in ispot — it will bring up the device’s control panel
    3) under the BASIC menu, go to LAN. Reserve the first IP address with slot 10, and add the MAC address of the device you want to add.
    3) Click save setting, restart the iSpot and you are set to go.

    No need to update after restarting computer.

  • Zhi

    DJ,

    Do you select the wifi adapter then spoof it? I tried various ways but it didn’t work. Do you have a step by step guide? I tried to follow the guide but I was un-successful.

  • Gary

    What are the steps to spoof on a PC; all I see is for the Mac?

  • Jim

    Instead of changing MAC address of the PC or other devices, couldn’t you just change the MAC address to a DD-WRT router, place it into a Wireless bridge mode, then everything connects to the DD-WRT router and it routes them to the Ispot? The DD-WRT device would assign the IP addresses to each device instead of the Ispot. Would that work?

  • Jacob

    Done this still work cause it not working on my Mac it let me change the Mac OS but do not connect to ispot. Can someone confirm it still working

  • Crystal

    I just received an ispot purchased on ebay.

    Tried the steps provided by Anon and it didn’t work for me in winXP using my wireless card’s mac address. Although I was able to get in and change the specified setting, it didn’t make any difference – I’m able to connect to other wireless networks, but still not the ispot. Any idea what I might be doing wrong?

    So then I tried the IP address spoofing via MacMakeup, using an itouch IP address I found in a google image search. This seemed to work as I was redirected to home.clear.com and asked to login with existing acct or create a new one. When I chose create new one and selected ispot as my device, it says “We are unable to validate the device you have as an iSpot device at this time. Please select a different device.” Is it because I’m using IE7? Any ideas how I can get around this? Do I need to borrow an itouch or iphone to register it first?

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