Monday January 19th, 2004

We have put into effect a new policy of globally banning all PB GUIDs associated with publicly posted CDKeys. Punks have been using these public CDKeys to cheat on PunkBuster servers with private hacks. This news post is to give a heads up to the honest community about why these bans are going into effect and also to once again warn about downloading and "testing" cheats/hacks.

Players should also NEVER use a peer-to-peer Internet file sharing program that shares the game folders on their hard drive - that is the same as giving away your CDKey to punks. We will not reverse these bans. If your GUID is banned in this sweep, then you will need to either play on non-PB Servers or obtain and protect another legitimate CDKey that has not been delivered (with or without your knowledge) to the punks.

Wednesday June 30th, 2004

The cost of hacking on PunkBuster servers has just gone up significantly. PunkBuster now computes Hardware GUIDs for various pieces of hardware on players' systems while playing on PunkBuster servers. We use multiple private one-way hashes so that no serial number information for individual computers can be determined by admins or anyone else who may try to obtain this information from a Hardware GUID (and as always, no personal information of any kind is examined, stored or transmitted by PunkBuster).

When players raise a violation that corresponds to hacking or interfering with PunkBuster's normal operation, we now (in addition to Global PB GUID bans) are Globally banning the new Hardware GUIDs across all games supported by PunkBuster (including games supported in the future). So punks who are determined to cheat so badly on PB-enabled servers that they try to hack PunkBuster may now need a new computer in addition to a new cdkey in order to return to PunkBuster servers. As with previous PB GUID Global bans, the new Hardware GUID bans are permanent and will not be lifted. As always, players who are affected by these Global bans will still be able to play on non-PB servers.

Honest users should never "test" hacks that claim to interfere with PunkBuster. We have successfully tested this new feature set over the past few weeks for a few supported games and will be rolling it out to all supported games over the next few days and weeks. Additionally, PunkBuster servers will be updated to signify whether kicks for Global bans are for PB GUIDs or the new Hardware GUIDs.