Sort of...

At the very least,  as soon as sites like Wall Street Journal and Forbes were aware of BTC, what the average user here needs to understand is that the very very serious money sharks were aware of BTC.

Some of them were aware before those articles came out, and many many others became aware because of those articles.

Even before the mid-May explosion in interest, if you look at google trends, you see that San Francisco was very hip to BTC. While there is possibly some connection to drugs and prostitution, San Francisco is also a major banking center.

Fighting it? Mayyyybe. Exploiting it? Expect that. This particular PC mag article is probably just some overworked and underpaid content farmer who has a word count to hit and is too overworked and underpaid to give a damn at that detailed a level. The MTGOX attack/hack is more suspicious to me because it happened through their auditor.