🦹 A thief 💻 Malicious software

stealer

1 9.1

A harmful computer program that secretly takes passwords and sends them to bad people

noun
/ˈstiːlər/

Specialized

: stealer

Thank you for your kind words; and I concur with your canny analysis of the current bandersnatch (aka threadjacker/bandwidth stealer).

Examples

- Had enough of these stealers.

King Kong (1933)
Restoring the system after infection will not help much if the keyloggers or password stealers were running for a while.

Blog text (13)
Many users were affected by a stealer that captured their login information and sent it to hackers.
The company's security team discovered a stealer on their network that was collecting sensitive data.
After installing the malicious software, the stealer recorded passwords and personal information from unsuspecting victims.

Antonyms

protector

129 2.8

A person who defends and cares for another person or thing

Compounds

scene-stealer

Literature

1 6.1

A person or thing that gets more attention than others in a scene

kill stealer

Jargon

9.9

A player who takes the final hit on an enemy another player fought

How Dangerous

stealer

Specialized

1 9.1

spyware

Specialized

21 4.8

adware

Specialized

2 4.4

benign

35 6.2

Surface Forms

stealer singular

stealers plural

Morphology

stealer = steal (transparent) = steal + er

The malware name uses the productive pattern 'verb + -er' to mean 'a thing that steals' (credentials/data), which is directly inferable from the components.

Etymology

Stealer in computing keeps the same idea: it names a small harmful program that comes from the verb steal because it 'takes' passwords and other secret data from a device and sends them away, so it acts like a digital thief.