Boden had waged a three-month war against the Scada (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system of Maroochy Water Services in Australia beginning in January 2000, which saw millions of litres of sewage spill into waterways, hotel grounds and canals around the Sunshine Coast suburb. He was caught only after a team of private investigators hired by Maroochy Water Services alerted police to his location.

After a brief police pursuit from the Sunshine Coast towards Brisbane, Boden was run off the road. In his car was the specialized proprietary Scada equipment he had used to attack the system, and a laptop; however, it was a piece of A$25 (US$18) cable that ultimately bought him undone.

Grounds for charges were slim, but the hand-made cable showed he had the technical capability to hack the Scada system.

The laptop found in his car contained enough messages to prove he sent commands to disrupt various pump stations and that, combined with proprietary radio equipment and specialized cable, was enough to find him guilty of what has been dubbed the first case of critical infrastructure hacking in Australia.

Speaking at the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO) conference on Queensland's Gold Coast Wednesday, Mark Tripcony, operations coordinator at Maroochy Water Service, said initially they thought the disruptions to their pumping station was due to a neighboring Scada system or poorly implemented software until late one night it became clear that some 140 sewage pumping stations were at the mercy of a hacker.