MAC address

[bigjake24]

Everyone,

I have a colleague that is investigating a residential burglary in which a television was taken. During the course of the theft the suspect's HTC Android phone connected to the victim's WIFI network and the router logged the date, time, and MAC address of the device that connected.

Is there a method to take the captured MAC address and associate that to the electronic serial number thereby associating the phone with a subscriber and a person of interest for the theft.

Any help would be appreciated,

-Jason

 

[vernotzy21]

If the router logged the Mac it should have a assigned IP address if you get that you can geolocate that IP and and find out where its located currently good luck!

Get the IP then Google Geo location or in Google play they have a app

 

[cyanogen-man]

hmm idk those do sent the assigned IP change with different roughters?I go to work and it seems different than the one at home you see as a cell phone it do sent have a designated IP lists static IP unless I'm mistaken????

INSPIRE AOKP ICE COLD SANDWICH ROM

 

[9h0s7]

Only the manufacturer would have that information. IMEI and ESN information is kept by them and does contain other information about the phone like the MAC address. Unless the alleged spoofed their MAC it could be tracked but information like that manufacturers won't just hand out even to the police you would need a court subpoena and it isn't guaranteed to be successful.

 

[detman101]

i know that there are apps for PC that can spoof your mac address. I'm sure the process is the same for these handhelds.

droid life baby...

 

[Xop777]

If the router logged the Mac it should have a assigned IP address if you get that you can geolocate that IP and and find out where its located currently good luck!

Get the IP then Google Geo location or in Google play they have a app

The IP is assigned by the router so every place where you connect over wi-fi you get a different IP address. The MAC address is not to be considered unique unfortunately. However, many devices can give a lot of clues that can be found in the router logs (device name containing model, manufacturer....).

Unfortunately, I don't think it'll give much infos on the theft...

 

[Shadowriver]

IP tracking is useless, because not only device is no it the one assign IP here (or else it been set manually, which no body do that on mobile device), but as it connect to LAN it being assigned a first free private range IP address, which is one of most un-unique things in networking.

Ferther more even with public IP tracking you won't get beyond information in which city the specific device is, or if you lucky district.... lot of people think you can get exact address just by IP which is complete BS, it's a biggest myth of internet technology ever. only registrant of IP address have assigned contact address to IP adress.... which is not you but your ISP. So how police do that? If you do something bad they go to ISP that IP address belong and ask under law who use it and give your adress... in other words your ISP is one responsible to protect your private data.... and yourself included

It's also funny how you guys care so much about MAC address..... which is practically useless beyond LAN or local ISP network, servers and routers beyond your local network your not aware of your MAC address because it is not used at all in TCP/IP standard. BUT! You can find same MAC address in other WiFi networks logs when that same person login to it, but tracking that out is near impossible as you don't have access to thosel ogs, in other words you can only confirm if that specific person was in that specific WiFi network, not track down based on MAC.

MAC is mainly used for LAN device identification, like in IP assignment process (aka DHCP) or any other LAN services... but nothing beyond that. Also rarely anybody spoofs MAC, as rooting/jailbreaking community minority of phone community, so people who spoofs MAC on mobile device is even bigger minority, so it is still reliable thing and i bet those thiefs are not so smart as you guys think to spoof MAC.

Conclusion: IP tracking alone is hard (Except for police), IP tracking of mobile device is near impossible as it mostly use private IPs and it's mobile, MAC is complitly useless not because it can be spoofed but it simply near impossible to track. So you should search of other hints. You would have more options if you would know IMEI of the device, which is phone GSM modem's MAC