[Manuel_D]

The two are not mutually exclusive: A hacker that steals people's banking info and drains their funds is a hacker and a financial fraudster. Hackers conducting ransomware attacks are hackers and extortionists. The fact that a computer was used to commit the crime is just a detail of how the extortion was carried out.

[jimbo9991]

Right but I agree with the above poster in the sense that the most relevant crime here is the extortion. Hacking can vary in severity from the totally harmless all the way to threatening the lives of millions. Leading off by calling this Hacking fundamentally fails to convey the severity of the crime in this case. "Finland's most notorious hacker" has a much better connotation than say "mass extorter of the mentally ill", don't you think?

The problem is that people are numb to news about "hackers" because often it's some sort of dumb story about some teenager messing around in somebody else's network and a netsec or government bureaucracy overreacting rather than properly securing their network, whereas this case is basically an instance of terrorism. It should not be possible for me to be confused which kind of hacking story this is from the headline. If I had come across that headline in the wild I would almost certainly ignored it due to the above.

Other folks in the comments have brought up the term "cyber-criminal", which I think also fails this same test for exactly the same reasons.

[chaxor]

Hacking can often simply refer to someone who writes code fast and loose, without care towards readability or reuse. The result usually looks like they were trying to be clever, but really it's just obtuse.

[taskforcegemini]

as in "he is a hack"

[stavros]

No, they are mutually exclusive. The word "hacker" originally meant someone enthusiastic about technology, someone who liked to tinker. The media distorted the word to mean "computer-related criminal", but that's a distortion.

The terms "hacker" and "criminal" are as mutually exclusive as "engineer" and "robber". Yes, maybe the robber knows how locks work so she can pick them, but "engineer" implies some level of ethics.