. When it comes to sniffing out unsecure Wi-Fi networks, you can take your pick of vehicle to drive around: we’ve had, feline (with bonus mouse catching!), and (with high heels packing Wi-Fi hacking tools, no less!). Now, a US cop has reverted to the plain old vanilla mode of wardriving in a car, but he’s not looking for hotspots or routers that lack passwords. Nor is he sniffing out routers using the creaky, old, easily cracked WEP encryption protocol.

• Police Looking For Man In Haverhill

Rather, Iowa City police officer David Schwindt is stalking stolen gadgets. Specifically, he’s cooked up some software and rigged up a thumb drive sized-antenna that plugs into the USB port of his squad car laptop to sniff out the media access control (MAC) addresses from a database of known stolen items. MAC addresses are unique identification numbers that act like a device’s digital fingerprint. Researchers have they also link to your real identity, and, according to, the National Security Agency (NSA) has a system that tracks the movements of everyone in a city by monitoring the MAC addresses of their electronic devices. Schwindt says his software product, which he’s calling L8NT – that’s a leet-speak/acronym hybrid that stands for latent analysis of 802.11 network traffic – won’t be used to find the occasional stolen iPod or laptop.

Neither will the tool give police access to personal or private information included in MAC packets, he told Rather, he has his eye on bigger cases: If your cellphone is stolen from a bar. That’s not necessarily what L8NT is intended for. But, if your home is burglarized and your cellphone is stolen, now, as a police chief, I’m interested in that technology. The device – which has a range of about 300 feet – scans for MAC addresses, looking for matches to known stolen items. The L8NT can also be attached to a directional antenna to allow police to determine where the signal is coming from and to obtain a warrant. However, the device does not work in all circumstances. If you walk around with Wi-Fi enabled on your phone, it will indiscriminately and, unlike an IP address which changes over time or when you switch networks, a MAC address is constant (though it can be, either for legitimate purposes or by a thief who wants to hide it).

But if a device is powered down, or if Wi-Fi has been disabled, the L8NT won’t be able to sniff it out. Nor will it do much good if legitimate device owners haven’t bothered to record the MAC addresses of their devices. Then again, it might also prove useless in the case of Apple’s iOS 8 devices.

Apple introduced a in iOS 8 last year, in an effort to help users ability to recognize their devices and thereby ID them at will. That randomisation isn’t constant, mind you: As Paul Ducklin at the time, randomisation only happens before you connect, when your Wi-Fi card is scanning for networks. When your iGadget finds an access point with a name that matches one of your known networks, it tries to connect by using your real, rather than your random, MAC address.

So the coffee shop you visit regularly won’t have any trouble recognising you, though a shopping mall you merely walk through won’t be able to ID you. But while there are cases where the officer’s L8NT won’t work, Schwindt still has big plans, he’s developed a proof of concept, has a provisional patent on the device, and plans to apply for a full patent this fall. In the meantime, he’s sent out surveys to law enforcement agencies to test the waters and see if they might be interested. Image of courtesy of. Follow for the latest computer security news. Follow for exclusive pics, gifs, vids and LOLs! Not sure where you’re coming up with your information from, but a MAC address is configurable on just about every piece of equipment.

It’s not ‘stamped in’, as you might assert, a MAC address is volatile, and can and quite often is cloned to spoof others who think it’s actually burned in. Take a look at Technitium’s MAC Address changer for a PC based utility of how quickly and easily it can be changed. Most PCs (Mac computers too) have the ability to modify TCP properties. I call bullshit on this story. No, there’s no database of MAC addresses.

Snowden (my former classmate) hasn’t suggested there’s anything of the sort. Damn do you people know how to put words in people’s mouths. Man: Man didn’t have the right form. Clerk: What man? Man: The man from the cat detector van. Clerk: The loony detector van, you mean.

Man: Look, it’s people like you what cause unrest. Clerk: What cat detector van? Man: The cat detector van from the Ministry of Housinge. Clerk: Housinge? Man: It was spelt like that on the van.

I’m very observant. I never seen so many bleedin’ aerials. The man said their equipment could pinpoint a purr at four hundred yards, and Eric being such a happy cat was a piece of cake. Joe, you’re completely off-base with this assertion. The legal hurdle which changes something from normal investigative action to “spying”, as you call it, is “expectation of privacy”.

If the cop was walking up to your window, peering into your house, and somehow reading the MAC address from somewhere an average citizen considers private, that’s illegal. If the cop simply picks up a transmission through the air, outside the premises of your house where you have no expectation of privacy, he’s absolutely fine. One doesn’t need a warrant to observe something out in the open.

Police Looking For Man In Haverhill

A couples of days ago this story was posted on that other UK site that reports security news (the one that uses the silly alliterative slang), and it got me thinking about MAC addresses. I asked the non-techs where I work if they knew what a MAC address is; a few had a vague knowledge of MAC addresses, A crook would have to be pretty tech savvy to know how to change or hide the MAC of a stolen device, and the victim would have to know enough to record or find the MAC address for a stolen device. Part of my job is to count the number of users on our publicly available Wi-Fi and I use the MAC addresses along with the device name to count use.

I can usually tell staff devices from public by both the MAC address and the device name (e.g. Alice’s iphone). I do have one question about MAC addresses: are MAC addresses included in the packets sent over the Internet?