Adobe in the News: July 30 - August 3, 2008 : AMF Spreads; Flash Player as a Disguise

by Judith Dinowitz, Editor-in-Chief

Adobe Spreads AMF to PHP

Adobe has offered to work with the Zend Framework to include support for AMF (Action Message Format), as detailed by Andi Gutman on his blog. This will allow for better connections between Zend and Flash-based technologies. The PHP guys that posted comments on Andi's blog seem excited about it, too.

AMF is already available for the CakePHP Framework, using Emanuele's AMFExt for PHP. Find out more at https://trac.cakefoundation.org/amf/.

Dojo Now Supports AIR

Dojo, an open-source JavaScript toolkit, is designed to provide "a well conceived API and set of tools for assisting and fixing the issues experienced in everyday web development". As of Dojo Toolkit 1.1.0 Beta 1, Dojo-based applications will now run successfully in Adobe AIR's secure application sandbox. You can find more about Dojo and the Adobe AIR support on their website (http://dojotoolkit.org/air and http://www.dojotoolkit.org/book/book-dojo/part-4-testing-tuning-and-debugging/alternative-host-environments-adobe-air).

Flash as an Excuse, Not as an Agent

Kaspersky Labs have reported a new worm in the wild that attacks Facebook and MySpace users. It uses the Flash Player as an excuse to get victims to download the worm, by pretending that the worm is a new version of the Flash Player. Here's how it works:

1. Sam Smith accesses his Facebook or MySpace account. (Not the real Sam Smith; an example Sam Smith... Please don't be annoyed with us, Sam Smith.)
2. He gets a message or commentary from a friend on the social network. The message was actually generated by the worm (dubbed Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.a by Kaspersky).
3. The messages is a spam message, with a subject like: Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street; Examiners Caught Downloading Grades From The Internet; Hello; You must see it!!! LOL. My friend catched you on hidden cam; Is it really celebrity? Funny Moments, etc.
4. The message includes links to youtube.[skip].pl.
5. Sam is curious... What's this video his friend has sent? He clicks on the link.
6. He is redirected to a website that supposedly contains a video clip, but he gets a message saying that he needs the latest version of Flash Player to see it. However, when he downloads the file, instead of the latest version of Flash Player, he gets a file called codesetup.exe, which is actually a network worm.

Basically, the worm uses the trust that social networks have generated among their users, and the ubiquity of the Flash player, to lure the victim into becoming part of a worm network – something you don't ever want to be part of.

So please remember one of the basic rules of internet security. If you get a message from anyone or anything, and you are not expecting it, and it prompts you to download anything, ask your friend if they sent it! Do not automatically download files, even if they claim to be new versions of the Flash Player, whoever you think sent them.

You can read all about this at the Kaspersky site.

Judith Dinowitz is the Editor-in-Chief of the House of Fusion magazines and journals, where she enjoys serving up ColdFusion and Flex goodness on a weekly and quarterly basis.

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