I was playing a flash game when a friend of mine showed me some Cheat Engine trick where you can search for integers in a flash game. eg your score is 100. To find the score, you'll need to search for the value 800 in Cheat Engine—this is probably a popular trick nowadays.
I've never played with Cheat Engine before, but I understand that it's a memory editor? I thought it had something to do with bits and bytes; 8 bits = 1 byte, but I'm not sure at all.
Does anyone know why you multiply by 8?
Here's a blog entry that also mentions this technique often, but doesn't explain it. Some of the comments also say it would be binary data and hence the multiplication, but no one seems to know it for sure.
This forum entry says it is some kind of "encryption" of Flash 8+ and with older versions one wouldn't need to multiply.
If you want to know for sure, perhaps you find an answer in the SWF specification (PDF file), but the problem is about the memory layout at runtime, so perhaps even that won't give you an answer...