It have been two weeks since I released SWF Decrypt to point out that some SWF encryptors  are worthless. While I didn’t directly contact Amayeta and DComSoft, I made sure they’d be among the first to know by explicitly mentioning their names, following them on Twitter, and posting comments on blog posts they commented on earlier. I have no doubt they knew about SWF Decrypt since the first day.

But none of these companies did anything. They didn’t update their broken software, they didn’t notify their users about this very important security issue, and they didn’t even contact me.

While I’m very pleased by the very positive feedback and the little buzz SWF Decrypt is getting, I am a bit disappointed by some of the reactions. For example, swftools.com rejected SWF Decrypt submission while is a perfectly legit SWF tool. At least, it is as legit as the 22 decompilers they are listing. And Emanuele, one of my favorite bloggers, blocked my comments on his recent SWF Protector review. Why are they trying to hide the truth and block it from reaching their readers? Any ideas?

Another interesting thing happened since the release. Some people thought that since I recommended SecureSWF and IrrFuscator then I must be working for them. Gareth Jones winked that I might be a new hire at KindiSoft. There is a reason why I would recommend those two and attack the other two. SecureSWF and IrrFuscator are actual ActionScript obfuscators. They do what other obfuscators for every other language are doing. They rename the classes and variables to make decompiled code harder to understand. But SWF Encrypt and SWF Protector do not do that. They are just rip-offs. If they rename anything, then SWF Decrypt will leave it renamed. It is not possible to revert to the original names. SWF Decrypt works in the same way for any SWF file and removes the few junk bytes it can find.

It took me a weekend to write SWF Decrypt, but by today Amayeta and DComSoft had over two weeks to fix their software. SWF Decrypt had proven to work very well and thanks to everyone who helped spread the word, it has been downloaded over 2,320 times. Why neither Amayeta nor DComSoft issued an update yet? I know DComSoft are at least trying.

Update: Amayeta is also “working on it”.