What "kind of people"?

They had the power to abuse that data and ship malware to millions, but decided just to give people a scare.

That’s just the average grey-hat, or how most hackers were in the 90s.

Compared with the profit-obsessed and abusive hackers and companies on the web today, which try to shove actual malware, sometimes installers with tons of preselected options, sometimes bitlocker, they’re not bad.

Black hat hackers who bask in people calling them names in response to their mischievous adventures.

Deleting the partition table is not grey hat, it's black hat. The bad guy in a Western isn't suddenly neutral just because he isn't literally Josef Stalin.

Links on HN are rel="nofollow" so they're not going to get any google juice.

I don't think SEO is what pluma is concerned about

So what are they concerned about then? There's some moral wrong to watching crooks be crooks?

There's some moral wrong giving people exposure who are being obnoxious in order to get exposure.

Linking may not imply endorsement but their twitter account clearly shows they want the public hate as attention, so whether you want it or not, you're doing them a favour by naming them, even if to scold them.

This is akin to associating every mass killing with a terrorist organisation (whether accurate or not) and showing detailed videos of those killings when the entire point of a terrorist organisation is spreading terror.

Don't think of it as publicity, think of it as threat intelligence.