You're listening to the inquiry on the BBC World Service with me,

Helena Merriman. Each week, one question, four expert witnesses, and an answer. Emmett Brewer sits back in his chair, feeling pretty pleased with himself.

He's just broken into a government website and changed the outcome of an election and it's only taken him 10 minutes

All that and he's just 11 years old.

Emmett's not the only one.

Next to him, dozens of other children sit hunched over laptops,

typing furiously as they hack US government sites.

One makes a candidate's vote jump to 12 billion.

Another changes a politician's name to Bob de Builder.

Luckily for the government though, these were replica sites. The kids just

volunteer hackers testing their defences. It was an event staged at the world's largest

gathering of hackers in Las Vegas and August. Thousands of them descended on the city,

as well as journalists, government employees and cyber security officials.

As they mingled out in the real world, hackers were launching an attack on an Indian bank. They infiltrated the bank server taking $13 million.

And by the time you hear this, there have been thousands of other cyber attacks,

stealing our money, blackmailing, intimidating or threatening us, crippling our businesses and

governments.

In the aftermath, as the dust settles, an army of cyber detectives will rake through the evidence to find out what happened, and to answer the most important question.

Who was behind it?

So this week we're going behind the curtain

into the shady world of cyber criminals

as we ask, how do you run a hacking operation

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