bad actor

noun

plural bad actors

: a person, group, country, etc. who purposely and usually repeatedly engages in very bad behavior (such as committing crimes or causing harm to others)

Giving users a way to prove that they're being harassed with, say, a screenshot or some other form of authentication could help Twitter catch bad actors, even after they've covered their tracks.

—Issie Lapowsky

A perennial diplomatic bad actor, North Korea has already rattled its sabers at the opening of the Obama administration.

—Alex Kingsbury

"We've got to break away from the notion," as the U.A.W.'s [United Auto Workers] director of public relations, Peter G. Laarman, puts it, "that labor is a 'bad actor' in the economy. …"

—Harry Stein

also : something that causes trouble, danger, or a problem

The bad actor in male pattern hair loss is DHT, a metabolic product of testosterone.

—Jane E. Brody

We have special ducts throughout the vapor bath that carry away all the toxic bad actors.

—PC Today

Examples of bad actor in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Developers hired his company, for example, to identify exploits that bad actors could use to drain a project of its funds. — Ben Weiss, Fortune, 9 July 2026

The question is whether the technology is designed to expose that misuse and help agencies hold bad actors accountable. — Irene Wright, USA Today, 8 July 2026

Fallback that requires manual intervention or user choice introduces friction that frustrates legitimate users and can be socially engineered by bad actors. — Gegham Azatyan, Forbes.com, 8 July 2026

No company is immune to data breaches or leaks, and there is always the risk that sensitive data will be misused by companies or bad actors. — Justyn Newman, PC Magazine, 8 July 2026

Word History

First Known Use

1879, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for bad actor

• attractor
• cofactor
• compactor
• contactor
• contractor
• distractor
• extractor
• impactor
• protractor
• reactor
• redactor
• refractor