Ok, a slightly long-winded take on this (short answer is yes, I agree, the word "attack" is a bad choice here).

But tl;dr is this is a problem of technical jargon crossing domains, where casual use of a word in one domain confuses the response in another. https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1338556633102786560

In infosec, the word "attack" doesn't really mean anything important. "X hacked Y" vs "X attacked Y" is mostly interchangable and nobody particularly cares. Your job in infosec is to defend the software/network. Call it whatever you want. It doesn't particularly matter.

But when discussing nation-state actions and we start to cross the language barrier into the geopolitical sphere, the word "attack" starts to have a more precise and important meaning. An "attack" in that context is more about the act provoking or justifying a violent response.

In that sphere, the distinction matters. Hacks happen all the time, and a violent whole-of-state response isn't appropriate or proportional to ordinary run-of-the-mill hacking, but might be a proportionate response to some specific actions /enabled-by/ hacking.

By way of example, if someone hacks a ship and forces it somehow to sink, the state-level response isn't particularly different vs sinking a navy ship by traditional means (like a torpedo). So that hack would be an "attack". But stealing some documents via a hack isn't like that.

So in this other domain, you need to have a way of conveying that these two things aren't the same, and using the word "attack" in the casual infosec-defender sense blurs the ability to make that distinction to the public and to the core stakeholders in that domain clearly.

So for journalists, whose job is to speak to sources who might be in one technical domain (like infosec), but whose article speaks to a more general audience (e.g. to policymakers and the general public), avoiding militarized words where they aren't appropriate is a good thing.

Will leave the last word on this thread to the Associated Press style book https://twitter.com/APStylebook/status/857639536133906432