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Locate Any WiFi Router By Its MAC Address

Posted by kdawson on from the reverse-lookup dept.

coderrr writes "SkyHook Wireless has been wardriving the US for years creating a huge database mapping wireless routers' MAC addresses to their physical locations. They provide an minimally documented API (docs here) which allows anyone to query the database directly for any MAC address. This could potentially allow some malicious individual to find out exactly where you live. Of course for them to get the MAC of your router in most cases will require either being infected with malware or some sort of social engineering attack... Imagine if you got a phishing email that included your home address."

5 of 204 comments (clear)

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  5. Re:Quick, Change your MAC! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Hate to break it to you, but routers typically do not have three MACs. Often the wired networks are handled by one MAC and the wireless network is handled by the other MAC. All ethernet sockets on the back of the router belong to the same switch. The switch is programmed to separate outgoing ethernet frames based on their VLAN tags and tag incoming ethernet frames according to the port. The interfaces that the user sees are virtual, but they still have their own separate MAC addresses, which can be changed individually.