Ask Your Question

Revision history [back]

click to hide/show revision 1
initial version

how to enable monitor mode on mac?

Trade in your Mac for an older model. 🤮

Unfortunately, some newer MacBook Pros, at least, appear to let you capture in monitor mode only if you run Wireless Diagnostics (Option+click the Wi-Fi icon on the menu bar and select "Wireless Diagnostics") and, as soon as it pops up its window, select "Sniffer" from the "Window" menu.

That runs an obscure program called "tcpdump", with the -I flag, with some special magic to let it capture in monitor mode. It's not clear what that special magic is, but running tcpdump from the command line, or running Wireshark, doesn't have the same magic (i.e., it's not some command-line option).

Note that running in monitor mode on those machines will disassociate you from your Wi-Fi network, taking away your network access. Perhaps that's why Apple didn't want it to be easy to do (unlike on older machines, where you can run in monitor mode and remain associated with the network).