It may have just been down when you checked. I just tried Youtube and SBS Dateline videos, both were working.

“Yan Zhao was just one of several hundred Chinese hackers who launched an assault on the websites of CNN and Carrefour using a relatively simple technique of gaining entry through the system’s weakest point known as the Webshell.”

I don’t think that is an accurate description of what happened to CNN and Carrefour.

Looking at the blurry picture it is difficult to tell. I downloaded a couple of different Chinese php webshells to test out and I can’t find any that look just like the one in the video. They also don’t let you manage multiple servers like the video implies.

I have used webshells before but they just gave a text box for you to enter in commands to run. This is useful for when you hack a webserver but can’t get a regular or reverse shell. There are some more recently developed webshells that give a lot more functionality such as file editing, upload, etc.

Webshells are easy to use on servers that are vulnerable to remote file inclusion.