An anti-cheat utility that covers many first person shooter games. Punkbuster assigns a unique id to every relevant person connecting to a game server, and checks to ensure that they are not running any cheating programs, hacks or bots. If cheating is detected, the player's CD key - and therefore the player - is banned automatically by the program. Punkbuster is used commonly on game servers world-wide - such a ban usually means the player's options for playing their game are greatly reduced. New changes introduced by the makers of Punkbuster mean that players may now be validated via their PC hardware. This means cheaters face possibly having their entire PC banned, as opposed to just their game's unique CD key.