Every day we see news about computers being hacked and how the cybercriminals make money off people clueless about the protection of their assets.

If a hacker knows your MAC address, he can only see the manufacturer name and the model of your phone. When you are on the Internet, your MAC address is only visible to other machines available on the same local network. And they can only see your presence on the network and nothing more. Hope this helps GIRI BHAI. Use the LPInstaller.apk file to install Lucky Patcher on your Android device. Open Lucky Patcher. Select a game you want to hack. Tap Menu of Patches' and tap 'Create Modified APK File. Tap the checkbox next to the options you want to include. Tap Rebuild the App.

For someone not very technical, it may sound as if hackers are so powerful, and the only way to hide is to shut down all devices and go off the grid completely.

However, the truth is that there are several simple things one can do to make sure that we are reasonably safe when browsing the internet without affecting our ability to access the information we need.

Whether or not someone can hack into the computer or phone through WiFi depends on a person’s proximity to the WiFi router. If a cybercriminal in the range of access to the WiFi router, they can connect to the local network and perform various attacks, such as Man In The Middle attack.

If the hacker is outside of the WiFi range, then the way they attack will be different.

Let’s consider various scenarios of how the computer can be hacked and ways to protect your devices.

Hacking Computer Through Local WiFi

As you probably guessed, it is much easier to hack the computer, which is in close proximity to the hacker’s device.

For instance, your neighbor can connect to your WiFi and use your internet for free. Or you may connect to the free WiFi in the cafe or hotel, but someone already hacked the network, and now everyone, including you, is a potential target.

Or maybe you are using the office WiFi, and it was also hacked.

And it doesn’t have to be a computer, such as a Mac or PC. Your smartphone, iPhone, or Android, which uses the WiFi can be hacked as well.

Let’s see what hackers can do if they are physically connected to the WiFi you are using.

Man in the middle attack

If you have the internet at home from a cable, DSL, or fiber-optic provider, you have a router. Your computer does not directly connect to the internet; it sends and receives data by directing it through the router.

In layman terms, the process is the following:

1. Your computer or phone finds a WiFi router.
2. After submitting the correct password, the router sends back its MAC address. MAC address is an identifier of computer components, and in theory, it should be unique across billions of devices on the planet. The network card on your computer also has a unique MAC address.
3. After you get the MAC address of the router, all internet activity will be going through the router. In the pic below, there is a MAC address next to each device on the local network, and the router’s address is 11:22:33:44:55:66.

When a hacker connects to the local WiFi router, it also finds the MAC address of the router. The hacker changes his computer’s MAC address to be the same as routers one (11:22:33:44:55:66 in the pic below).

Now, all devices on the local network connect to the hacker’s machine, and then the data flows to and from the router. So the hacker becomes a man in the middle (MITM).

Once this happened, the hacker can read all outgoing requests and incoming data using various tools that collect such data.

This means every time you enter a username and password on some web site or enter your credit card number, and it gets saved on the hacker’s machine. Also, every URL you are visiting also gets saved.

There are some limitations, obviously. For instance, if the website uses the HTTPS protocol (S at the end stands for Secure), all traffic is encrypted between your computer and cybercriminals will not be able to crack it (in most cases).

However, if the web site uses HTTP, all data, including the password, is in cleartext.

So, if you want to avoid your data being stolen, always check that web site is using a secure protocol (HTTPS). In the browsers, the secure protocol is usually displayed with a padlock icon next to the URL.

Never enter passwords or financial information on web sites with HTTP!

How the router can be hacked

When it comes to your home WiFi, there are three ways for someone outside to connect to the router:

1. The router is not password protected
2. You tell the password. For instance, you told the guest the password, or she looked it up on the router (if you didn’t change the default one)
3. If the router is using an old authentication protocol

I am going to skip the first two and instead of focus on the last one. The authentication protocol used in with WiFi router is very important.

If your router is old, it is possible that it’s still using WEP protocol, then you should know that anyone who knows a little bit about hacking can hack the router literally in less than a minute.

So, if you have it enabled on your router, then go ahead and disable as I did.

What you should have is WPA2 with AES encryption. In the pic below, the authentication strength (protection from hacking) increases from top to bottom (WPA is less secure, and WPA2-PSK with AES is the most secure).

Some hackers employ a dictionary attack to crack WPA protocol, but it takes supercomputers to hack it. So as long as you are not a celebrity or a billionaire, nobody will spend so many resources to break into your network.

Usually, you can connect to the home router settings by going to the local IP address, such as http://192.168.0.1/.

How to tell if someone hacked your router

One of the sure routers hacked signs is the existence of an unknown device connected to the local WiFi network.

As I explained above, in order to perform a man in the middle (MITM) attack, the hacker must connect to the WiFI network first. And if he’s connected, you can see him too.

One way to find out the connected devices is through the router settings. Some routers allow us to see all connected devices and kick them out if needed.

Another way is to use a network scanner app. For instance, I found a cool app called Fing. The app is available for almost all platforms: iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows.

It is free (with ads) and doesn’t even require creating an account in order to use it.

One cool feature they have is scanning for open ports.

For instance, when I scanned my MacBook Pro, I found that remote desktop and screen sharing features were enabled, and anyone could connect to my Mac remotely.

How to protect from a MITM attack

While it is possible to scan and find unknown devices on the home network, this approach will not work with public WiFi networks, such as the one in Starbucks or the hotel.

You would never know if the public network was compromised. In this case, the only way to protect your privacy is to use a VPN (a virtual private network).

When connected to VPN, your computer or phone creates a secure encrypted channel with the VPN server. After the connection is established, all requests go to the VPN server. The server makes all requests on your behalf and returns the results back to you.

From outside, it looks like the computer is sending some garbage to and back to the same computer. Even if the hacker collecting the information, he won’t be able to tell whether you’re connecting to Google.com or MacMyths.com.

When choosing a VPN software, follow these best practices:

• Do not use a free VPN. They have significant limitations, and you know that good things are never free.
• Test for speed. Some VPS are significantly faster than others.
• Check the provider’s reputation. Since all requests now go through the VPN, technically, the VPN server becomes a man in the middle. So choose only reputable providers.

Personally, I am using NordVPN: it’s the fastest on the market and very inexpensive. It is available for multiple platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.

If you use my NordVPN affiliate link you get a pretty steep discount for three-year plan for up to 6 devices.

Hacking Computer Remotely

We discussed ways to hack the computers and phones through local WiFi, but I know the question that most people ask is whether hackers can connect to the home network when they are on the other end of the world (or more than a hundred yards or meters away).

Fortunately, the answer is no, someone cannot get into your home network, even if they know the password if they are outside of the range (more than 300 feet).

Also, in most cases, hackers cannot get into your computer is off (link).

However, there are other ways to get into your system remotely. Do you remember a story of Bezos’s personal data being leaked?

In his case, he received a message on WhatsApp with malware attachment. When the malware was installed on his phone, it started sending the personal data to the server abroad.

Similarly, we are all at the risk of having malware installed on our computers and smartphones. Some malware open access to the device, so the hackers can access it remotely.

Or, the malware could be a keylogger, and in this case, even having HTTPS or a VPN will not help. A keylogger will record the keys pressed on the keyboard, and if it happens to be a credit card number, then the hacker will have it.

So, how to protect the devices from malware? You need to install an antivirus program.

There is a common myth that Macs cannot have viruses, but this is not true. I was able to inject my Mac with more than 100 malware samples when testing various antimalware solution.

You can check the results of my test and recommended antiviruses in my post: Best Malware Detection App for Mac.

Every time my friends and family ask me for a recommended antivirus, I go with Norton 360. It comes with the biggest bang for the buck and provides antimalware and other security features on all platforms. And it also has its own VPN!

Conclusion

We reviewed multiple ways how someone can hack into your phone or computer through WiFi. I also listed ways to prevent this from happening, which I wanted to reiterate.

If you worry about online security, consider investing in the following tools:

• VPN software
• Antivirus program

Be very cautious when connecting to public WiFi. I’d say if you don’t have VPN installed on a laptop or smartphone don’t use public WiFi, or at least avoid making purchases with a credit card or entering passwords.

If you are interested in the topic of security, there is a great course available on Udemy about ethical hacking. The instructor teaches how to hack computers ethically and most importantly what can you do to prevent from being targeted:

Learn Network Hacking From Scratch (WiFi & Wired)

Photo credit: ©canva.com/cyano66

Hack Device With Mac Address

I am going to expose an important topic on hacking knowledge that some of you might know and most of you don’t. When you’re going to hack a computer or server on the Internet, you won’t want your IP address to spill out. That’s because your ISP could easy trace you by two simple information which is the time and IP Address. So you’ll need to use proxy or even chains of proxies to avoid being directly traced by the victim’s firewall.

If you think you’re safe hiding behind a proxy server, bad news is most proxy server has logging enabled and your IP address is definitely listed in the log file when you’re connected to it. It is possible that the administrator of the proxy server passes your information to your ISP and you’ll still get caught at the end of the day. Don’t forget, there are still some other important information that can be obtained from an IP Address if a person knows what tools to use.

One of it is your network adapter’s MAC address.

Every network card contains a unique code called MAC address that is permanently assigned to it, similarly like every computer requires a unique IP address to be connected to a network. Although these information can be configured to have the same, it would cause conflict and connection problems. To view your network card’s MAC address, just run the command “ipconfig /all” in command prompt and refer to the value of Physical Address.

One thing you should know is the MAC address on your computer’s network card will not get passed out to the Internet so there is no way a website or an Internet server can capture this information. Only your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can detect the MAC address of your modem or router. So basically your ISP is capable of tracking your location by your IP address, time and the MAC address of your modem or router.

In another scenario, some people may still be using WEP encryption for their wireless network because some old devices don’t support WPA. WEP encryption is very weak and can be cracked in less than 5 minutes using BackTrack Linux. Most of the time they’d also enable a second line of defense which is the MAC address filtering to only allow authorized devices to connect to their wireless network but they’re wrong. A hacker can easily find out the authorized MAC address, change their network card’s MAC address to the authorized ones and poison the ARP cache to prevent the owner’s machine from connecting to it.

Here’s an example of Belkin Play Max F7D4401 v1 router. It has a MAC Address Filtering feature where you can set up a list of allowed clients and use the wireless connection.

Other than that, some time limited shareware such as Hotspot Shield that uses your MAC address to keep track of the free usage. If the trial period has expired or is pending to reset every month, you can easily bypass this restriction by changing your MAC address. I bet by now you should know the power of spoofing your MAC Address. MAC address can actually be changed directly from Windows but the easiest way is to just a free program called Technitium MAC Address Changer.

To change your MAC address, run the program, click the Random MAC Address button followed by the Change Now! button. The update takes effect immediately without a reboot and stays intact even when you boot up the computer tomorrow. To restore back your original MAC address, click the Restore Original button on Technitium MAC Address Changer program.

Download Technitium MAC Address Changer

To manually change your MAC address in Windows 7 without using a third party software, go to Control Panel > System > Device Manager. Expand Network Adapters and double click on the network card that you want to change the MAC address. Go to Advanced tab and look for Network Address in the Property box. Click on it and you can specify your own value with any random 12 characters of letters and numbers.

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Hack Device With Mac Address Free

The Technicium Mac address changer has certain restriction in some cases (particularly Wireless connection) such that we should use only ’02’ as fist octet of mac address (as you can see a checkbox in the tool). So, it seems it is not possible to completely spoof your mac address as another PC’s mac address. May be we can play with, by just hiding behind some random mac address.

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Hack Device With Mac Address Windows 10

spoofing the MAC randomly every few minutes may be more useful.

Hack Iphone With Mac Address

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If you’re behind a router, your ISP only sees the router’s MAC addy. That’s the one you should change.
Regardless, if you have a home broadband connection, you might have a hard time arguing with your ISP since they tie your IP to the modem id.

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