He's joking mostly. He uploaded a webshell through the very poorly designed system that was in use. A webshell just runs whatever command it's given on a the machine its located and returns the results.

A nodejs based webshell is like 5 lines of code.

edit: imagine a URL like this: http://yourtarget.example.com/webshell?cmd=whoami

And that runs "whoami" on the target machine and returns the results.

Gotya...

So why would anyone assume that these are state sponsored hacker servers that were infiltrated then?

Read the Kaspersky report. https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sit...

I suspect light sarcasm on the part of the perpetrator.

or maybe they wanted to see how much bullshit they could feed vice and still get printed

Probably this. I'm extremely left leaning but even I know vice is absolute dogshit. I used to work in the tar sands with my brother's, and once a year we have a tradition of watching the Vice tar sands "documentary" to laugh at how wildly inaccurate and ill-informed it is.

Yes, but he is no longer with Vice due to “differences of opinion” with the direction of the company.

Who have since disowned Vice multiple times.

by "1337 hack" I concur, but "custom html 0day" sounds oddly specific imho.