🛠 AI botnet turned free blog hosting pico.sh into a communication channel
The pico.sh platform team reported in status update status-016 that it discovered an AI botnet: bots were creating accounts on the free blog service prose.sh and exchanging data through pages published there, and the discover page was already completely filled with bots. Instead of the usual step — moving the service to a paid tier — prose has been decided to remain free, but with an invite system: an account is created freely, but it only starts working after an invitation from an existing user. After launching invites, the team promises to return the free tier to the pgs.sh service. In the same update, pico announced the CI system pici (beta at ci.pico.sh), the CI/CD platform cd.pico.sh, and the git service patchbin (pr.pico.sh), where a pull request is created with the command «ssh pr.pico.sh pr create» instead of git send-email.
🌍 This is a case documented by the operator themselves where agentic systems use legitimate free hosting as a coordination channel instead of classic C2 servers: public blog pages are hard to distinguish from normal traffic. Owners of open services have to close free registration with invite gates to preserve the free tier.
👤 This is a clear example of spam from AI agents in practice: not cards with images, but generated pages in the prose.sh discover feed. Registration without an invite is practically meaningless, so new authors will need an invitation from an active user. The original source is the status update from the pico team itself; you can also take a look at the platform's SSH-native tools: pici, cd.pico.sh, and patchbin.
Source 1: https://pico.prose.sh/status-016 Source 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49777626