By Vixn

Introduction

You’re at the airport and need some Wi-Fi. Luckily for you the airport provides you with some, but only for an X amount of time. When that time runs out, you’re off the net.

You’re scanning for local Wi-Fi networks in your neighborhood and you happen to live in a city where a company such as C0mc4st has happily commandeered your favorite neighbor’s router to provide a hotspot that you can use for a not-so-small fee. Luckily for you, after poking around, you notice that they offer a one-hour free trial for their services. After that hour, they kick you off.

Here’s a simple guide to sidestep that time limit. In essence this tutorial can be given in one sentence, but I’ve opted to write it in such a way that I hope is informative and encourages a certain kind of critical thinking so that a newcomer might progress and come up with tricks like this independently.¹

The Trick

When you try reconnecting to a hotspot like the ones mentioned above, the router of the hotspot provider rightfully identifies that your computer has already taken advantage of their free trial. The first question that we might ask is how such a hotspot can identify your machine as the same one-even after a reboot, etc. The answer (generally) is that your machine has thing called a MAC (Media Access Control) address. This has nothing to do with Apple. Basically, a MAC address is associated with your network card and allows a router to identify you. It normally stays the same and consists of six groups of two hexadecimal digits usually separated by colons (e.g., aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff). This address can be changed (read: spoofed) pretty easily depending on your system. When you spoof it, you temporarily give your machine a new address thereby telling the hotspot that your computer is someone else. And really, that’s all there is to it. Spoof your MAC address.

How to do it exactly depends on your operating system, and tutorials are easy to come by. One thing to note is that not all MAC addresses work if randomized improperly so don’t be discouraged if your first attempt fails. The reason it doesn’t work is likely because the second digit of the first grouping of your spoofed address (the second ‘a’ in the series above) must contain only a 0, 2, 4, 6 or a, c, e.

Further Tricks

The next steps you might consider are writing some scripts. One idea you might want to try out is having your system randomize your MAC so that the second digit in the first grouping takes the digit limitation into account. Or you can randomize everything else, setting that second digit permanently to one of the digits mentioned above – but if you take advantage of hotspots daily it might leave a calling card you might not want. Another idea would be to write a script that turns off your network card, spoofs your MAC, and reconnects your machine for you. This is a good idea because this process needs to be done anyway each time you spoof your MAC and need to reconnect to the hotspot. You may even want to add more on to the script to aid this process. For instance, you might want it to auto-fill and randomize user info should that might be requested during a free trial sign up.

The downside to all this is having to reconnect each time the trial timer runs out, but it’s better than paying. Writing some code speeds things up.

Uses and Abuses

Obviously this trick can be taken advantage of in various ways. Before going on let me just remind you that your data is flying through the open air to some random person’s hotspot and you should take some steps to protect yourself (e.g., utilizing a live OS, TOR, a VPN, HTTPS, etc).

Without going into too much detail these hotspots can be used creatively to your advantage in some of the following ways:

• Save money by not paying for Internet (if you live in an C0mc4st xf1n1tyw1f1 infested city, for example).
• Save time by not running software to steal a Wi-Fi password.
• Further anonymity by having no active Internet services in your name.
• Further privacy by avoiding high-density public spaces and cameras (rather than utilizing, say, a coffee shop for certain activities, find a quiet area with a hotspot) (note: high traffic areas might also be used to your advantage).
• Fast and easy access to practically an unlimited source of regions in your city for your Internet doings.

Hope this helps some of you and fills you with warm digitized feelings of being a cyberpunk. If you ever want to talk you can find me on #lainchan or Tox:

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