Since that lowest-hanging fruit consists of the majority of wireless access points, MAC filtering can be of value as a way of turning away the majority of opportunistic attackers.ĭon’t rely on MAC filtering alone, however. Its resource consumption is almost unmeasurable, and even if it doesn’t keep out any reasonably knowledgeable security crackers willing to spend a few moments gaining access, it does keep out a lot of automated opportunistic attacks that are aiming solely for the absolute lowest-hanging fruit on the security tree. This doesn’t mean MAC filtering is useless. Anyone who pays any attention to current trends in wireless security at all should know that MAC filtering is less effective than WEP - and that WEP can be cracked almost instantly these days with commonly available tools. MAC address filtering for wireless networking isn’t real “security”.