How do you tell that from the MAC address? I’ve never looked into this kind of thing but it seems like it would be useful to know.
If you Google “MAC address lookup” there are tons of sites that will do a lookup for you. I tried about 8 of them and two couldn’t identify this particular MAC, but all the rest came up with Liteon Technology Corp.
I think the manufacturer is derived from the first 6 characters.
… it also appears that the same manufacturer can own many different blocks of completely different 6-character prefixes and use different ones on exactly the same devices. Each prefix maps uniquely to a manufacturer, but not the other way around.
Some routers allow you to reduce transmit power (or you can relocate it, even remove the antenna), if you think someone outside is tapping in, may still be plenty strong enough for your usages.
Are you 100% sure it isn’t one of your own devices using a different MAC for their 5g radio or something?
I am sceptical to the idea that one of your direct neighbors is an accomplished hacker who can crack WPA2 at will. (And uses that skill to hack your Wifi)
Has a tool to look it up and an explanation on how it works. Basically the upper 3 bytes of mac addresses are assigned to manufacturers.
The Internet protocols depend upon the actual hardware that does the talking on the media having a unique address. Ethernet addresses are expected and assumed to be unique for this reason. The only useful way of ensuring this is to allocate each manufacturer blocks of addresses from which they allocate individual addresses to every component they make. The address space is sufficiently large that we won’t run out of addresses, and the addresses turn up in other networking systems, as it is a rather convenient place to get unique addresses.
I have twice in my life come across a network failure that turned out to be caused by a manufacturer messing up and accidentally duplicating a MAC address. Having two devices on the same network with the same MAC address causes the most utterly bizarre problems. You could be convinced that the network was possessed rather than anything else. Especially when one of them is advertising itself as the gateway out.
Nearly every router (even the cheapest home routers) come with the capability to clone a MAC address and most even allow you to type in an address of your choice.
I really hope this is a woosh.
If it does, the interface should be smart enough to ensure that they never appear on the same network. If you clone an address for the router that is on the same side as the cloned address the system will die in a mess.
Why? Would you like grim details?
Following up three times - must be a sign of madness.
To be clear about why MAC addresses can be cloned, and why it is not always fatal.
The question with home routers is stupid, but occasionally necessary. Many (if not most) DSL systems now use PPPoE as the connection protocol back to the ISP’s equipment. In the past DSL was based on PPPoA. (PPP is point to point protocol, o = over, and E = Ethernet A = ATM). Using Ethernet protocol on the link back over DSL (even though it isn’t Ethernet in any other form than the content of the packets) allows integration into a lot more networking systems, not just the more traditional ATM based systems the telco’s used. This means your router has an Ethernet MAC address that your ISP sees. Some ISP’s use this MAC address, and the assumption of its uniqueness, to enforce some dopey ideas of lock in. They will refuse to work if the MAC address the connection was set up with changes. If you change modems, or were initially connected with a dedicated per-computer modem, you need to force the new modem to look like the old one. This can mean cloning the MAC address of the old modem, or possible actually cloning the MAC address of the computer onto the new modem.
Two things. 1. The choice of MAC address to clone is not arbitrary. You must clone the old MAC address that was in use, no other will work. 2. The cloned MAC address is not on the same network as your home computer equipment, it is on a PPPoE network, where it is replacing a device with exactly the same MAC address that has been removed.
If a router provided the ability to replace the MAC address it has on the LAN side of its function, and allowed you to replace it with the MAC address of say a computer on your local network, the entire local network will die.