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
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

  • By
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Retrieve Your Gmail Emails Using PHP and IMAP

    Grabbing emails from your Gmail account using PHP is probably easier than you think. Armed with PHP and its IMAP extension, you can retrieve emails from your Gmail account in no time! Just for fun, I'll be using the MooTools Fx.Accordion plugin...

  • By
    Reverse Element Order with CSS Flexbox

    CSS is becoming more and more powerful these days, almost to the point where the order of HTML elements output to the page no longer matters from a display standpoint -- CSS lets you do so much that almost any layout, large or small, is possible.  Semantics...

Discussion

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