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A botnet that was being used to target Mexicans has been taken down, apparently by the cyber criminal who set it up, according to TrendMicro. “The botnet appears to have been taken down by the owners themselves,” writes Ranieri Romera, a senior threat researcher with TrendMicro.
“The botnet's controllers sent out new instructions to all of the active bots,” Romera writes. “One of the effects of this was to stop all of the bots' phishing attacks perhaps because our own post exposed all of the proxy servers and redirected hosts used in those attacks.”
After taking down the so-called Tequila botnet, the cyber criminal(s) set up a second one, dubbed Mariachi botnet, which was also rapidly dismantled.
“Both the Mariachi and Tequila botnets went offline after their command-and-control (C&C) servers were taken down,” writes Romera. “The Mariachi botnet's C&C server appears to have been taken down by its hosting provider, Bluehost.”
