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
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools 1.2 Image Protector: dwProtector

    Image protection is a hot topic on the net these days, and why shouldn't it be? If you spent two hours designing an awesome graphic, would you want it ripped of in matter of seconds? Hell no! That's why I've created an image...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ElementSpy

    One part of MooTools I love is the ease of implementing events within classes. Just add Events to your Implements array and you can fire events anywhere you want -- these events are extremely helpful. ScrollSpy and many other popular MooTools plugins would...

Discussion

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