Originally Posted by JadedTraveler
A few more points: Trival perhaps, but someone will have to be determined to do so, i.e., your next door neighbor (unless a total hacker/geek) won't be doing it just to steal your bandwidth.
Ah, JT you beat me to it!!
Trivial, yes the technique is fairly simple for the informed, but for the non tech geek, or heavy tech user, this is not something that someone is going to easily stumble upon, or even read a user group and perform. Sniffing the address is one thing, and implimenting it as a spoof another. We sometimes forget the nature of the things which we DO Do, on a daily basis and often consider them rather simple and/or trivial.
Remember, many many MILLIONS of people continued for YEARS to have 12:00 displayed on their VCR's, never to be able to program them ONCE. So much so, that ATT had a special 800# just for getting the accurate time. Regardless of time of day, or HOUR called in it continue to tell callers that the accurate VCR time for programming was:
12:00!!! 12:00!!! 12:00!!!
As long as stimply isn't your neighbor, spoofing the MAC address is not going to be a relevant threat, IMHO.
Now, for someone living down on University and 10th, in NYC, lookout. I have sniffed peoples addresses, to gain "very short and benign" access to wireless internet just to get my mail or buy a ticket online, only to find a few moments later someone trying to HACK into my laptop.
All I can say for those users is, AIRSNARE alerts are a life saver.