I remain mystified why people who – based on their deep tech reporting – I can only assume know better than this keep abusing the terms "hacker" and "hack". 🙄
"Researchers", "pranksters", "attackers", "malicious actors" are so much better and more clear in any relevant context.
Similarly "compromise", "break-in", "leak", "vulnerability".
The audience of any tech-related piece will understand these terms just as well as "hacker" or "hack". Or *better*.
There is no good reason for this.
What if they are aiming to increase the number of people who are intrigued enough to start reading the article (á la "you can't guess what happened"-style headline)? I would expect that being imprecise helps with that goal (because you can tell less about the story from the headline) and using terms that sound less pedestrian than they are does that too. (And then you want to keep consistency in the rest of the article, maybe?)
