Subtitles of the Movie

One more security measure we can take in, uh, securing our wireless networks is MAC address filtering. Now, you probably know that the MAC address, or Media Access Control address is a hardware address for your wireless clients. It's an actual hardware address for your wireless network card. Now, you can filter access to that wireless network by this MAC address. You can use this filter to prevent or enable access to the wireless network from certain hardware addresses. MAC address filtering kind of came to be in widespread use after WEP vulnerabilities were discovered. And while it does have some effectiveness, just like SSID hiding, it's effective only to a certain degree. And something you should use, but understand that it's not going to help you too much. MAC addresses are easily sniffed and spoofed by different software that hackers can use to put on your wireless network, sniff, find out what the MAC addresses that are allowed access are and then spoof those addresses on their own machines. Now, as I mentioned, access points can be configured to allow certain MAC addresses, uh, only certain MAC addresses to access the wireless network or to disallow certain MAC addresses. You may have situations where you have five machines that attach to your wireless network and you only want to allow those five. So you would filter to allow on only those five machines. Either way, it's of limited effectiveness. Let's take a look at the first scenario where you allow computers with the MAC addresses listed below, as it says in the diagram, to access your wireless network. And you can see I only have one MAC address listed. That's the only computer that's going to be allowed to access the wireless network based upon the MAC filter. Now, on a side note, one side benefit of this is that you can deny certain computers from accessing the wireless network. One scenario that, uh, I've, uh, used myself and I'm sure other parents have used is that, uh you can deny access to your children's computers by MAC address as well. In the event they don't clean their room or whatever. But, uh, that could be used as an additional safety or security feature. But again, don't rely on it too much because MAC addresses can be spoofed and they can be used to connect to your wireless networks. So you have to have other security measures as well. Use some of the ones we've talked about. WPA2 encryption, SSID protection and MAC address filtering can be used, but only when used with other security features as well because by themselves they're of limited effectiveness.