Background:

A lot of places offer “internet”, or “high speed internet”. Though, these statements are mostly true, they come at a price, a hefty price. Most hotels will charge 10$ per 24 hours of access. At some of the hotels I have done this at, such as the Hilton New York, they charged 15$ per 24 hours for normal access and 18$ per 24 hours for dedicated for access with a dedicated ip. The Milford Plaza Hotel in New York charges 11$ per 24 hour access, and the Mammoth Mountain Inn in Mammoth Mountain California charges 10$ per 24 hours. Some airports offer free wifi access, but some airports, and coffee shops offer certain “hot spots” provided by other companies. Such one I ran across was a t-mobile hotspot in JFK Airport. Their service is 10$ per 24 hours or like 30$ a month with a 1 year contract or 40$ a month with no contract. If you travel a lot for and need internet access, always paying for access can put quite a nice dent in your wallet.

How paying for internet works:

In hotels, and what not, it will usually get charged to your room, if not it will prompt you for a credit card or some other form of payment. So basically, how it works is when you plug into the network (or connect via wifi) you will connect to their network and should dhcp no problem. When you go to a website, such as google.com it will redirect you to their purchase page. Now, if you were really to pay for it, you would enter the required information here and continue and their system will grant you access for what you paid for. From the 4 different places I have tried this; I have seen that all pay-for-access will grant access based on mac address. The nic (network interface card) and the mac address bound to that nic that you are connected to their network with is now enabled with internet access.

How to get internet free!

Tools (windows):

Mac Makeup

Wireshark

Angry IP Scanner (optional)

Tools (linux):

tcpdump

ifconfig

The general idea here is to spoof their network to think you are one of their paying customers. Before I go into details on what to do, this is basically the overview:

1. Connect to the network

2. Sniff out other ip’s on the network and basically browse the network and other computers.

3. Find somebody who already has access and get their mac address.

4. Change your mac address to theirs and cycle your nic on/off.

5. Enjoy the free access.

Step by step howto (windows):

1. Connect to the network

2. Open up Wireshark and start a capture for the nic you are connected with.

3. Filter it so you can just see the network traffic your connected to with this (insert filter thingy)
If you are having trouble finding traffic or other computers, you can use Angry IP Scanner to see what other computers are on the network.

4. Pick an ip that you think had access and look at the corresponding mac address

5. open up Mac Makeup and select the nic you wish to change
NOTE: BE SURE TO SAVE YOUR ORIGNIAL MAC ADDRESS
Open up command prompt and type ipconfig /all and save it somewhere.

6. Look at the new mac address and enter in the box in Mac Makeup and click Change.

7. Now you should have internet access.

WARNING: When you spoof your mac address to somebody else’s, you will dhcp to the same ip as them. If there is a conflict, there should be a message saying network ip conflict, but this has only been a problem once before. Also your internet might slow/speed up randomly, or totally not work based on how heavy the traffic flow is of computer you spoofed yourself as.

I didn’t write a guide for linux cause the linux way is easier and more straightforward. Just tcp dump, look for other computers, and change your hwaddr with ifconfig and restart the nic.

I will have a wifi locator page up soon, but for now, you can use t-mobiles wifi hotspot locator.

Happy Hackinng.