Crackas With Attitude

Crackas With Attitude, also known as CWA, is a hacking group that operates primarily out of the United States of America. The group is not a formal corporate entity but rather a loose collective of individuals engaged in illicit cyber activities. Its known activities involve targeting high‑profile individuals and institutions through social engineering techniques. CWA has been described as focusing on spear‑phishing and credential harvesting to gain unauthorized access to personal accounts. The collective’s actions have included forwarding a victim’s home phone calls to a political advocacy group and claiming access to law‑enforcement databases that exposed personal data.

On January 18, 2016, CWA carried out a notable operation in which it compromised the personal accounts of several senior U.S. government officials. The attack began with spear‑phishing messages sent to family members of a White House senior advisor, allowing the attackers to obtain trust and gather information. Using credentials acquired by impersonating the advisor in conversations with his spouse, the group forwarded his home telephone calls to a political advocacy group and subsequently accessed his email account. CWA also claimed to have infiltrated law‑enforcement databases, an action that allegedly exposed the personal information of thousands of individuals, the majority of whom were government employees. Beyond this single incident, the group’s broader campaign targeted multiple high‑profile victims across the intelligence, national security, and diplomatic sectors. The scale and nature of these breaches prompted federal agencies to launch investigations into the group’s activities. To date, the publicly available information about CWA remains limited to the described incident and its associated disclosures.