How to Get a Computer's Hardware ID

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!

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