It's legit. Read the malicious changes he made to the code and read the posts from the researchers.
And sorry, people are not "gullible" for disbelieving the media. I have worked at most big tech companies and the media misreports so badly on easily verifiable things in my area of expertise, that I no longer trust them on much. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_a...