sorry for the long post. hopefully it dosnt discourage anyone from helping me out. thanks alot.



so ive been given some recourses to study and get started on ethical hacking. ive been reading up on the tcp/ip guide and been checking out other stuff to get started on pen testing. and ive be using VMWare ESXi on my other laptop to simulate a network. ive been told that hackers leave a trace with there mac address, making changing your ip pointless if youre trying to be stealth im guessing. i checked out how to change my mac address and some places say you cant becuase the driver wont let me on windows vista. and some say that you can. ive tried through regedt32, i enabled and disabled my NIR, and rebooted. the mac still has not changed. how would i bypass what ever it is that my driver wont let me do? and how would i find out who was trying to get in my simulated network? also if someone were to change/spoof there mac address, how would i find out who they acually are? or would they be completely anonymous? thanks alot.

ok cool. i will see if i can figure out how to gain accesss to the cam table. is there any way to change the mac on vista so i can test it out? and you said that the mac only works when the attacking machine is in the same sumnet as you, so when you say rogue mac address are you saying that mac is masked? thanks dude

If another machine is on the same subnet as you then the Layer 2 (MAC) address of each machine is seen by the other.

If they are on a different subnet they the need to go through a layer three device, usually a router, in order to talk to each other. The layer 3 device is the gateway to the other network. The traffic destined for another network is sent to and received from  the MAC address of the gateway (router).

Hope that helps.