Nowadays, hacking has increased so much, that even people who don’t know much about computers have started hacking, in some or the other way. People have started hacking email address and social networking ids and passwords too. Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) are also been fooled by their own user’s.

At my neighborhood, sify is one of the leading service provider’s. It provides broadband internet connection where different computers are connected with help of router’s placed at each area.

This ISP provides an ID and Password, which would give access to the user’s account, they also provide a unique IP address (Internet Protocol), which connects the user to the internet. They also keep a track of your MAC (media access control) address, which makes sure that the appropriate computer is trying to access the internet. Suppose, if you try to use your ip address in a different machine, it will pop-up an error saying that ‘the machine id is incorrect’.

Now, here’s what people at my neighborhood do, they first download software called Ethereal from the internet. Ethereal is a software that searches your network and throws the ip addresses that are been used at that particular time, thus you get to see all the ip addresses that are been used. Since those ip addresses are connected, with their actual login ID and password, we can gain access to the internet by just using their IP.

But these ISP’s can’t be fooled that easily, they come to know if someone is trying to use other people’s IP address. And if they catch you, then you will be fined a hell lot of money. I’ll tell you how they get to know whether we are using a different IP address. Remember Mac address that I had mentioned earlier, yes, that is what tells the ISP whether who is using the IP address.

Thus to avoid such situation they use a software called TMac, which changes the mac address of your internet. Now once you change your computer’s Mac address, you can use different ip address as much time as you wish and the isp won’t even come to know about this.