• Pup Biru@aussie.zone
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    3 days ago

    i’d argue that any serious company wouldn’t really bother with MAC identification… they’re so easy to spoof that it adds to operational overhead far more than the benefit it brings

    more likely with these things you’d have a VLAN mapped to a physical port, and if that port were disconnected you’d instantly get a notification and send someone to check it out

    • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Spoofing a MAC is easy but it still requires knowing both what an existing valid address is, and ensuring that it’s not already connected to the network. It’s only operational overhead when a new device is onboarded, after that the impact is minimal.

      A policy that requires sending a tech is fine, but if you have hundreds or thousands of individual locations then you aren’t going to have a tech onsite at every one of them to quickly check and fix an issue, and you don’t really want to have to trust an end user to verify and/or make physical changes on site if you can avoid it.

      • lazynooblet@lazysoci.al
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        3 days ago

        This is still trivial. A Pi with 2 NICs and a Linux bridge. Using the 2 ports, effectively put the Pi in between the device you want to spoof and the rest of the network. Now you can see the traffic, the MAC addresses etc.

        • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Port security prevents this. As soon as the switch detects a physical disconnect it disables the port.

          You could, with some electrical engineer-level tools and hardware, passively read the traffic to determine the MAC and then splice into the wire without disrupting the physical connection. But it would be very hard to do covertly or quickly.

      • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 days ago

        Don’t really need to send a tech immediately. More efficient to get a gas station clerk (or whoever works where the ATM may be located) to verify nobody is trying to fuck with it on-site and they didn’t lose power/internet at their location, before escalation.