Last week, I dug some dirt on DComSoft and Eltima and I got them really pissed off. This week is dedicated to Amayeta.
Known for providing the worst customer service anyone can expect, Amayeta started after MDM acquired Flashincrypt in 2005 (Amayeta and MDM are the same company too). Back then, a few developers wrote Flash applications that required any sort of protection and Flashincrypt was the only usable software. A more powerful software was in the make called ASO from Genable Labs. While it was never officially launched, I had the chance to test ASO and it was very promising. But Genable disappeared, all of a sudden, and I wasn’t able find any resource that said what happened. Their website just went down one morning and never got back up. Prior to the disappearance, Genable announced that they sold ASO Lite version to a CA company and they will continue to develop ASO Pro version. But that was their last announcement.
So how is that related to Amayeta? Well, Genable released a utility very similar to SWF Decrypt before disappearing called FINI that reversed Flashincrypt protection in November 2004. Flashincrypt was temporary discontinued until, by mid 2005, MDM acquired it and created SWF Encrypt. So, SWF Encrypt was born of a useless software to begin with 
When SWF Encrypt 3.0 was released, it looks like Amayeta did not give Flashincrypt’s users a free upgrade as anyone would expect. They treated their users as if they were upgrading from a usable version looking for improved and additional features. You can see it on this page that I pulled from internet archive. They were clearly asking users to upgrade for a fee.
I am not sure when SWF Encrypt 3.0 got bypassed, but when Amayeta released SWF Encrypt 4.0 they literally said “The Encryption Technology used to protect your ActionScript are up to 1000 times stronger than previous builds.” as you can see here. But it didn’t take long for ASV to bypass their protection and show the world again that it is just a useless piece of junk. At that time, I was using SWF Encrypt 4.0 and I paid $125 for it. I saw my Amayeta protected SWF files decompile in ASV as if they were not protected at all! Even worse, I contacted their customer support a couple of times and never received a response. That was early 2007.
If SWF Encrypt 4.0 was “up to 1000 times stronger” than 3.0, then what on god’s earth was SWF Encrypt 3.0 doing?! What were they charging people for?!
Every release of SWF Encrypt was pretty much bypassed. Since 2004, anyone who had a look at how they did their protection was easily able to figure it out and reverse it. Authors of FINI and ASV both said it took them just minutes. I’m definitely not as experienced as they are, so it took me a weekend. If you still doubt that SWF Encrypt is just a scam and Amayeta is absolutely not a trustworthy company, check out swfdump and try it on your files before and after using SWF Encrypt. Let me know how long does it take you to figure out how stupidly their protection works!
