What Is a HWID Ban?
A HWID (Hardware ID) ban occurs when a game company or anti-cheat system identifies a player's computer hardware and permanently blocks that hardware from accessing the game. Unlike account bans, a HWID ban persists even if you create a new account — because the system identifies you by your hardware, not your account.
Anti-cheat systems typically collect: disk serial number, MAC address, motherboard serial (SMBIOS), GPU identifier, monitor serial number, and system UUID. Some or all of these may be added to the ban list.
Which Anti-Cheat Systems Enforce HWID Bans?
Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) is used in Fortnite, Rust, Apex Legends, and Arc Raiders. HWID bans are aggressively enforced — typically paired with an account ban.
BattlEye (BE) is used in Escape from Tarkov, Rainbow Six Siege, and PUBG. Similarly bundles account + HWID bans.
Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) is used in Counter-Strike 2 and other Steam titles. VAC bans are permanent; HWID bans can be applied alongside the Steam account ban.
Ricochet is used in Call of Duty: Warzone. Runs at kernel level, issues shadow bans and HWID bans together.
Vanguard (Valorant), unlike others, loads at system boot and uses hypervisor-based checks. Standard HWID spoofers do not work with Vanguard.
How to Remove a HWID Ban?
There are two ways to remove HWID bans:
1. Hardware replacement: Replacing the disk and/or motherboard physically changes the identifiers the ban is based on. Costly and time-consuming, but fully effective against the anti-cheat system.
2. Kernel-level HWID spoofer: Tools like HWID Core rotate disk serial, MAC, SMBIOS, GPU, monitor, and UUID identifiers at the Windows kernel level, presenting a fresh identity profile to the anti-cheat. No hardware is physically changed; the software runs only in memory, nothing is written to disk.
HWID Core is effective for games using EAC and BattlEye (Fortnite, Rust, Apex, EFT, CS2, R6 Siege, PUBG, Warzone, FiveM). Vanguard (Valorant) and FACEIT are not supported.
Is a HWID Spoofer Safe?
Using a kernel-level HWID spoofer always carries some risk — no tool is 100% safe. HWID Core's safety features:
Memory-only operation: Nothing is written to disk. The driver cleans itself after loading.
Kernel driver: Runs at Ring0, below the layers anti-cheat hooks into.
Close and play: Close HWID Core before anti-cheat starts. When anti-cheat initializes, HWID Core leaves no trace.
Stay updated: Game updates can also update anti-cheat. HWID Core offsets are automatically updated server-side.