[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"