Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think some of this is true, but it doesn't really excuse anything. I mean, you're right about his age and pizza and hobbies. They turn a tech-news story ("Major malware attack stops") into a human-interest one ("Meet the man who saved the internet"), which plays way better for these papers. The general public, or at least their readership, probably does enjoy those details. And I suspect they didn't exactly conside…
I didn't mention anything about "excuse" or "justify" in my comment; trying to project these things onto the moral axis is pointless and kind of boring, actually. I think it's far more interesting in figuring out _why_ people do certain things and how to change it than to assign "good" and "evil" labels to their acts.
Really, a remark like that is on the same level as someone calling mathematics "pointless and kind of boring".
What makes it particularly not-pointless, is that it allows one to discuss these things without you having to feel any need to defend yourself because indeed you didn't say anything about "excuse" or "justify".
Similarly, math allows us to say "two plus two equals four" without anyone having to jump in and clarify that they never said it wasn't four.