You can file this next bit of news under a creative but uniquely sophisticated category of software engineering. Black Lotus Labs security researchers have discovered a new botnet, powering a rather insidious malware campaign, called PoeLLM. Like any other malware, the goal is to infect as many systems as possible and take control — this one scoops up infected machines into a botnet to build a remote web of servers. What's different about it, however, is that it utilizes a poem, published on GitHub, to issue and deploy commands. Once infected, the compromised machines use a command-and-control (C2) process to phone home to a server, and the location or key to that server is issued through the poetry.

When the actor in control of the malware changes the words in the poem on GitHub, the infected machines use them to derive the new C2 server address.…