At work we have a wireless setup and I tried to hook my laptop up to it....but it requires an access key.  Any way around this?

If you know where your wireless router is...look on the bottom for the Mac Address...most of the time IT people..for some retarded reason..use the mac address of the router for the password...

thanks but it was a no go...the MAC ID is 00-0d-8d-f0-0c-de and the thing says it has to be 5 or 13 ascii characters or 10 or 26 hexadecimal characters.

that means its wep encrypted, there are ways of cracking it but its not the easiest thing to do.

*disclaimer*
this link is provided so that you may test the strength of the password on your own wireless network, not for hacking into someone elses.

edited by admin: [WEP-cracking link removed]

not to completely thread jack mak, but my wife things your pic looks like humpty dumpty running back and forth haha

re: the actual question, try admin ... and then for fun, look for "the broken" .. 4 ep online show done by the guy who runs digg now ... first ep is how to find/access WEPs   i can get you a link if you can't find one 

think of the easy stuff first . if you work at a place that has a store number i.e. the walmart i work at is #1254  you might try that or the the job name any thing around there that you would think they would use . you would not belive how many ppl use the easyest thing around them to make up a password.

If this is at your house you can reset your router, which will reset the wep or wpa encryption. Also you can hook your laptop directly into your router and access your router settings and change the password from there. Unless you changed your router password (not the same as wep or wpa password) there is a default password for every router. If you don't know how to access your router settings let me know the make and model.

this is at work.  cant change settings

if its at work, why not ask someone who knows it, lol.  it sounds shady that your tryin to get around it.  not that u are

it is shady....it's not my network.  it's designed for our feedtrucks...I'm just trying to hit it up so I can have a high speed connection instead of a crap ass 15k setup.

If it's using WEP, it's rather trivial to break into. WEP is mathematically weak, and it can be broken fairly easily if you have time to sniff some packets. As for finding the tools to do it, you are on your own.

If it's WPA, don't waste your time.

They might also use MAC address filtering, which would require you to spoof your MAC address to a known approved MAC address.