So how would you have written the quoted bit? It seems pretty masses-friendly to me, any addition of disclaimers or weasel words would just detract from it.

To raise an earlier quote, a central sentence from the abstract: "In this paper, we discuss the requirements for a successful, full-system, lo- cal privilege escalation attack on such media, and show a filesystem based attack vector. " This is also a good description for the masses, and only a very sloppy journalist would read past that and jump to premature conclusions.

(side note: I don't think there's any need to get into credentials about who's been in academia. There are lots of terrible writers, and minority opinions about writing, in academia.)