How to Get a Computer’s Hardware ID

By  on  

Cheating in online games is a huge issue these days -- just ask anyone playing PUBG. Cheaters aren't difficult for players to spot but vendors oftentimes don't do enough to punish these villains. Krafton recently announced they would start banning cheaters by hardware ID, which got me thinking about how you can get a user's hardware ID.

There's no definitive "hardware ID" provided by a machine, but you can create your own based on how specific you want to get. The hardware ID you create can be created from multiple pieces of hardware. Let's discover how to get important IDs of different hardware components:

# Get information about the motherboard
wmic baseboard get serialnumber
#> 0JU9387_84S397K

# Get information about the hard drive
wmic diskdrive get serialnumber
#> 1234-5678-9012-3456

# Get information about the CPU
wmic cpu get processorid
#> J8S4332SKJ93

Which hardware elements of the computer to build the hardware ID is up to the developer. I prefer to use maximum punishment by checking any of the components for a banned ID. A cheater could sell one component to another player but the chances are pretty low. Regardless, take action to track users by hardware if you foresee problems!

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    iPhone-Style Passwords Using MooTools PassShark

    Every once in a while I come across a plugin that blows me out of the water and the most recent culprit is PassShark: a MooTools plugin that duplicates the iPhone's method of showing/hiding the last character in a password field. This gem of...

  • By
    Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips

    The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below: The amount of jQuery required to duplicate this effect is next to nothing;  in fact, there's more CSS than there is jQuery code!  Let's explore how we can duplicate jQuery's tooltip effect. The HTML The overall...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!