What's a MAC Address and How Do You Find It? Honolulu HI

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Originally published at Internet.com

To ensure optimal wireless network security, a little MAC (Media Access Control) filtering couldn't hurt. Learn what a MAC address is and how to find yours ... plus, why some online games may be dropping you.

By Ron Pacchiano

Not to long ago a good friend of mine became a victim of identity theft. Trying to repair all of the damage that was done to her credit was frustrating and took what seemed like forever to resolve. Since then I have become very protective of my personal information. I bought a shredder and try not to use my credit cards online unless I really need to. This anxiety about identity theft has kept me away from purchasing a wireless router.

A while back I saw an article you wrote that described how to properly set up a secure wireless network. So based on the advice in your article, I replaced my aging router with a new wireless one. I implemented all of the things you suggested. I'm using WEP with 256-bit encryption, and I'm not broadcasting my SSID.

One of my router's other features that I want to enable is something called MAC address filtering. According to the documentation, this would restrict access to the network to only the PCs that have been registered with the router. So even if someone managed to get my WEP key, they still wouldn't be able to connect to my network.

My problem is that before this, I had never heard of a MAC address, nor do I know how to go about finding it. I know what my IP address is and tried that, but it didn't work. Could you tell me exactly what a MAC address is and how I can go about finding it on my computer? Thanks.

Sorry to hear about your friend's identity theft issues, and I understand your concerns with wanting to be as secure as possible. Just remember that restricting access to your wireless network isn't enough. Make sure you have a good anti-virus package with constantly updated virus definitions installed and running on your PCs at all times. Also, you should always be performing Windows Critical updates as well as using malware removal tools such as SpyBot Search and Destroy and Ad-Aware periodically to eliminate any possible threats to your system.

While your wireless network is already pretty secure, it doesn't hurt to enable MAC filtering as well. So to answer your question, MAC is an acronym that stands for Media Access Control. The MAC address (also known as the physical address) is your computer's unique hardware number. When you're connected to the Internet from your computer (or host as the Internet protocol thinks of it), a correspondence table relates your IP address to your computer's physical (MAC) address on the LAN. This is how the router knows where to send IP packets destined for your system.

Identifying your MAC address is easy. In most cases, it is physically printed on the adapter itself. On a laptop with a PC Card-based adapter this is easy to see. Just disconnect the card and flip it over. On a PC or a laptop with an integrated network adapter you'll need to find the MAC address using software. The process is almost identical to the utility you use to see your system's IP address. On a Windows 2000 or Windows XP machine that would be IPCONFIG. To see the MAC address you need to add the switch /ALL to the command. For those not familiar with it, the sequence of steps is as follows: