"We eventually annihilated all the little things we thought might be causing faults, which were excessive station alarms, pumps running continually or being turned off, software configuration settings changing.

"But one night around 11pm a systems engineer was changing configurations in pumping stations and immediately realized they were being changed back ... this happened for about half an hour and we then realized we were being hacked and had to catch the culprit," Tripcony said, adding that at one stage Vitek had turned off every single alarm in their system and sent sewage running through the drains in a neighboring suburb.

"We worked out he had to be within a 40 kilometer radius, but one night we had not seen any evidence of hacking until he came on about 6.30am. We had private investigators put cars along all the bridges and overpasses from the Sunshine Coast to Brisbane, because we knew the description of his car and knew he would be driving past. The investigators waited until they saw him on the highway and contacted police to intercept the car.

"When police went to intercept him he did a runner; the police then ran him off the road and found a car full of proprietary gear. No one had seen him hack our systems, but from his laptop we were able to find the last recorded event and messages sent which exactly matched our Scada radio monitoring systems."

Vitek was arrested, charged and found guilty on 30 charges of computer hacking, theft and causing environmental damage and jailed for just over two years.