There's been an irritating trend of malware authors and other digital miscreants self-identifying as 'security researchers' lately.

If they just want to hack other people's shit, they should own up to the antipathy that comes with that. Instead they act like extorting companies over undisclosed vulnerabilities, emptying *coin exchange accounts, posting credential dumps on the internet or exfiltrating gigabytes of data are somehow noble or academic endeavors.