Why Won't The Terminal Wifi Hack Work On My Mac

  1. Why Won't The Terminal Wifi Hack Work On My Mac Free
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  4. Why Won't The Terminal Wifi Hack Work On My Mac Computer

If the WiFi indication is missing from the menu bar, go to the Apple menu - System Preferences - click the Network icon - select WiFi. See if your Mac joins the correct wireless network. If it does, check if you have provided the correct password.

Oct 17, 2017  Why It Doesn’t Make Your Network More Secure. The main reason why it doesn’t make your network more secure is because it’s really easy to spoof a MAC address.A network hacker, which can literally be anyone since the tools are so easy to use, can easily figure out the MAC addresses on your network and then spoof that address onto their computer. Sep 30, 2019  This is Mac OS X’s built-in Wi-Fi troubleshooting tool. I’ve personally never had it solve a single Wi-Fi problem, but hey – maybe it will work for you – and Apple has improved the tool.

MAC address filtering is one of those controversial features that some people swear by, whereas others say it’s a complete waste of time and resources. So which is it? In my opinion, it’s both, depending on what you are trying to accomplish by using it.

Unfortunately, this feature is marketed as a security enhancement that you can use if you are technically-savvy and willing to put in the effort. The real fact of the matter is that it really provides no extra security and can actually make your WiFi network less secure! Don’t worry, I’ll explain more about that below.

However, it’s not completely useless. There are some legitimate cases where you can use MAC address filtering on your network, but it won’t add additional security. Instead, it’s more of an administration tool that you can use to control whether or not your kids can access the Internet at certain times during the day or if you want to manually add devices to your network, which you can monitor.

Why It Doesn’t Make Your Network More Secure

The main reason why it doesn’t make your network more secure is because it’s really easy to spoof a MAC address. A network hacker, which can literally be anyone since the tools are so easy to use, can easily figure out the MAC addresses on your network and then spoof that address onto their computer.

So, you may ask, how can they get your MAC address if they can’t connect to your network? Well, that’s an inherent weakness with WiFi. Even with a WPA2 encrypted network, the MAC addresses on those packets are not encrypted. This means that anyone with network sniffing software installed and a wireless card in range of your network, can easily grab all the MAC addresses that are communicating with your router.

They can’t see the data or anything like that, but they don’t really have to break the encryption to access your network. Why? Because now that they have your MAC address, they can spoof it and then send out special packets to your router called disassociation packets, which will disconnect your device from the wireless network.

Then, the hackers’ device will try to connect to the router and will be accepted because it is now using your valid MAC address. This is why I said earlier that this feature can make your network less secure because now the hacker doesn’t have to bother trying to crack your WPA2 encrypted password at all! They simply have to pretend to be a trusted computer.

Again, this can be done by someone who little to no knowledge of computers. If you just Google crack WiFi using Kali Linux, you’ll get tons of tutorials on how to hack into your neighbor’s WiFi within a few minutes. So do those tools always work?

Why Won't The Terminal Wifi Hack Work On My Mac Free

The Best Way to Stay Secure

Those tools will work, but not if you are using WPA2 encryption along with a fairly long WiFi password. It’s really important that you don’t use a simple and short WiFi password because all a hacker does when using these tools is a brute force attack.

With a brute force attack, they will capture the encrypted password and try to crack it using the fastest machine and the biggest dictionary of passwords they can find. If your password is secure, it can take years for the password to be cracked. Always try to use WPA2 with AES only. You should avoid the WPA [TKIP] + WPA2 [AES] option as it’s much less secure.

However, if you have MAC address filtering enabled, the hacker can bypass all that trouble and simply grab your MAC address, spoof it, disconnect you or another device on your network from the router and connect freely. Once they are in, they can do all kinds of damage and access everything on your network.

Other Solutions to the Problem

But some people will still say it’s so useful to control who can get on my network, especially since everyone doesn’t know how to use the tools I mentioned above. OK, that’s a point, but a better solution to control outsiders who want to connect to your network is to use a guest WiFi network.

Why Won't The Terminal Wifi Hack Work On My Mac Download

Just about all modern routers have a guest WiFi feature that will allow you to let others connect to your network, but not let them see anything on your home network. If your router doesn’t support it, you can just purchase a cheap router and attach that to your network with a separate password and separate IP address range.

It’s also worth noting that other WiFi security “enhancements” like disabling SSID broadcasting will also make your network LESS secure, not more secure. Another one people have told me they try is to use static IP addressing. Again, as long as a hacker can figure out your network IP range, they can use any address in that range too on their machine, regardless of whether you have assigned that IP or not.

Hopefully, this gives you a clear idea of what you can use MAC addressing filtering for and what expectations to have. If you feel differently, feel free to let us know in the comments. Enjoy!

OS X's command line and I have never been what I'd call 'friendly'; rather, we have a mutual respect and understanding about not messing with each other. (Well, as much of a mutual respect as one can have between a human being and a code window.)

While the average person should never have any reason to visit Terminal, Apple's command line interface app actually does give you access to quite a few neat tricks and shortcuts.. if you're willing to take a peek.

What is Terminal?

Apple's Terminal app is a direct interface to OS X's bash shell — part of its UNIX underpinnings. When you open it, Terminal presents you with a white text screen, logged in with your OS X user account by default.

Here's the important part: With a system administrator account and password, you have direct access to tweaking almost everything about your computer's software code; that means that while this little window provides great power, it comes with great responsibility. In short, be careful before using Terminal to execute commands, and make sure you understand what you're typing.

Why Won't The Terminal Wifi Hack Work On My Mac Pc

You can also use Terminal to securely connect to other machines, web servers, and even create your own scripts, but those are how-tos for another day. For now, we're going to focus on using Terminal to explore your own computer.

Basic Terminal commands you should know

Before we get started with the fun stuff, let's learn some basic Terminal terminology and commands. These form the framework for more complex interactions (aka, the fun stuff).

How to execute a Terminal command

You can type something in the Terminal window until you're blue in the face, but it won't execute until you press the Return key on your keyboard. At that point, it will either return an error if you've typed something incorrectly, or the command will execute.

Unless you're executing a command that requires the display of text in Terminal, you won't have any indicator that what you've done has been successful; you'll just get a new line with your user name on it once the command is finished processing.

When writing commands and paths in Terminal, almost everything is case sensitive: This means that you need to remember to properly capitalize 'Dock' when referring to the Dock, or OS X won't understand your command.

What's a path?

You can use Terminal to get direct access to your files without using the Finder. To do so, you build something called a path. Paths look similar in some ways to website sub-directories, and follow the structure of your folders.

Paths take two forms: absolute paths and relative paths. An absolute path starts at the root level of your hard drive, and is displayed as '/'. So if you wanted to make a path to your Applications folder, you would write '/Applications/'.

Relative paths are defined based on where you've already navigated to, and represented by './'. For instance, if you go to the '/Applications/' folder in Terminal, that's your current working directory (cwd). You can then get to your Utilities folder by typing './Utilities/' rather than '/Applications/Utilities'.

When you first launch Terminal, you're starting in the current working directory of /Users/myusername/ (also known as your User folder).

How to display and move between files in Terminal

To actually put all this path knowledge to use, you'll need the Terminal commands for displaying and changing files.

ls: The 'ls' command, by itself, displays the contents of the cwd. So if I were just to type 'ls' in Terminal, it would display the contents of my user directory:

Why Won't The Terminal Wifi Hack Work On My Mac Computer

You can optionally add an absolute or relative or path if you want to view a different directories. So, for example, if I wanted to view the Utilities folder inside Applications, I could type 'ls /Applications/Utilities/'. This won't change your current working directory, but it'll let you view other directories on your hard drive.

You can add options to view more information about that directory. The options for 'ls' include:

  • -l, which lets you view the permissions of each file in the directory
  • -R, which will not only show each folder in the directory, but all their files, as well
  • -a, which will show any hidden files in the current directory

cd: Where the 'ls' command lets you view a directory, the 'cd' command will actually move to that directory (change your cwd). For instance, if after viewing the Utilities folder, you want to move to it, you'd type 'cd /Applications/Utilities/'.

pwd: Write this command by itself to help you remember the path of your current directory. When typed into terminal, it will print the full path of your cwd.

man: This command, followed by another Unix command, lets you read the Unix manual about the second command. This is super useful if you want to try a cool Terminal trick you found online, but aren't sure what those commands actually do.

For instance, typing 'man ls' will get you information on the 'ls' command, which lists directory contents.

How to modify files, folders, and preferences in Terminal

defaults: This command is often used in Terminal tips and tricks to tweak applications and system settings via their preference files. You can use it to do things like disable transparency in the menu bar, always show your scroll bars, change trackpad behavior, and much much more. You'll usually see this paired with either 'write' and a string, as with this:

Why Won

The code above lets you save all your screenshots as JPGs instead of the system default PNG.

killall: If you execute a Terminal command that affects any system process or app, you're going to need to reboot the process to make it take effect. 'killall' followed by the process will do so. (This is also another way to force quit misbehaving apps or processes if your Force Quit menu isn't behaving.) Remember, this command and its target are case sensitive.

ln: OS X has long offered aliases, which let you create links to files, folders, and applications elsewhere in the system without having to duplicate them. Unfortunately, certain apps don't play well with aliases. With the link command 'ln -s', you can create a low-level, UNIX-based symbolic link which most system processes will recognize. Likely, you'll never have to make a symbolic link, but on the off-chance you want to perform a Terminal trick that requires them, this is how you do it.

The first path listed is your original file's path; the second path is where you'd like your symbolic link.

chflags: This commands lets you view and change the flags on a file or folder. For most people, the only flags you're going to care about are 'hidden' and 'nohidden', which hide and unhide documents, respectively.

sudo: If you spend any time online, you've probably heard of 'sudo' before. This is Unix's override command, and lets you execute any command as an administrator — provided, of course, that you have the requisite password and permissions. It probably goes without saying, but as a Terminal beginner, it's generally a good idea not to mess with commands like 'sudo' unless you are 100 percent sure what you're doing.

How to use Terminal for fun and whimsy

say: Feeling lonely? You can make your computer say anything you like with the 'say' command, and you can even record it in audio format to your desktop, if you so choose.

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl: This isn't technically something local to your Mac, but it's my all-time favorite Terminal trick. https://meethoff.weebly.com/blog/parallels-for-mac-3120. Some kind soul on the internet made an all-ASCII version of Star Wars: A New Hope; run the following code, and you'll be treated to a full showing. If it doesn't make you smile just a little bit, you might be dead inside.

macOS Catalina

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